VelonaCore

A single-cycle VHDL implementation of the 32-bit Leros instruction set.

Supported boards:

Basys3: Memory map detailed in memorymap.md

Compiling & Executing a Program

Prerequisites

The build scripts within the applications folder assumes a specific layout of the Leros-related repositories. Therefore, when checking out this repository, it should be placed next to the other Leros repositories, such as:

.
├── leros-llvm
│   └─── runtime
├── leros-lib
│   └─── runtime
├── build-leros-llvm
|   ├─── bin
│   └─── ...
└── VelonaCore

A Leros toolchain must be available to build programs for VelonaCore.
Build the Leros toolchain (https://github.com/leros-dev/leros-llvm) by executing the bundled build.sh script. The leros-lib repository (required for building applications for VelonaCore) will be checked out during building, and will be placed as seen above.

Compiling a Program

Build your program using the BuildApp.py script. Example usage:

cd VelonaCore/applications
python3 BuildApp.py sevensegment

This will output two text files in the VelonaCore.srcs/sources_1/rom-init folder:

app.text: The .text segment of the just compiled application
app.data: The .data segment of the just compiled application

These file contains a textual binary version of the program which you've just compiled, and will be used to initialize the instruction- and data memories within the core.

For now, the only precaution is to ensure that the memory_zones.h header file contains the correct memory sizes as the design is being built with.
Memory sizes are specified in the VelonaCore_basys3mem.vhd file.

Once a program has been compiled, the design is to be resynthesized in Vivado.

Executing

The VelonaCore will, once out of reset, start executing from address 0x0. Given successfull synthesis of the VelonaCore as well as the program, once the bitstream is written to the FPGA, the program should start executing.

Note: The build system has been tested on a Ubuntu 18.04 machine.

Adding Programs

Source files for a given program should be placed in a subdirectory within the VelonaCore/applications/ folder. The name of this subdirectory will be the target used in either the BuildApp.py script or as a parameter to the Makefile.
Example:

cd VelonaCore/applications
mkdir foo
touch foo/main.c
# write a program in foo/main.c
python3 BuildApp.py foo

Todo:

Build system

Include .rodata section into RAM initialization file (this involves linker script work + BuildApp.py modifications). .rodata may be placed after the .data section, possibly exchanging place with the .bss section.
Remove .bss from the generated app.data file. the .bss section is per definition empty, and we need only to know the size and position of the section to zero it.

Hardware

Add support for the remainder of IO on the Basys3 board. Initial support should only include memory mapping of peripheral pins.
- Pushbuttons (should be debounced)
- PMOD connectors
- VGA
- RS232 uart
Start thinking about interrupts

mortbopet/VelonaCore