Embecosm are presenting at FOSDEM 2019

Once again Embecosm will be presenting at the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2019, held in Brussels. This two-day event on the 2-3 February is a free and non-commercial event, to promote the widespread use of free and open source software.

This year Jeremy Bennett, Mary Bennett, Mark Corbin and Lewis Revill will be presenting a variety of talks on various Tracks.

Jeremy will be presenting ‘Embedded FreeBSD on a five-core RISC-V processor using LLVM. How hard can it be?‘ This talk will be going through the steps needed to bring up a functioning embedded FreeBSD system on a multi-core heterogeneous RISC-V system. Given FreeBSD has already been ported to RISC-V and LLVM is the standard BSD C/C++ compiler surely this should be easy. But it wasn’t. Jeremy will be presenting this talk on the BSD devroom track in Room K.3.401 on Saturday, with the talk starting at 12:35.

Jeremy will also be presenting ‘How compact is compiler RISC-V code?’ This talk will present measurements of code density for 32-bit RISC-V, Arm and ARC architectures using the GCC and Clang/LLVM compiler tool chains using the BEEBs benchmark suite for deeply embedded systems. The purpose of this talk is not to show that any one architecture is best, but to provide insight which will drive compiler optimization for code density. Jeremy will be presenting this talk on the RISC-V devroom track in Room AW1.126 on Saturday with the talk starting at 14:15.

Mary will be presenting ‘Using SAIL to generate GNU assembler/disassembler and simulation for RISC-V’. This talk will be looking at how a SAIL specification can be transferred in to a CGEN Framework. This is a work in progress – the project is not due to finish until May 2019. Mary will be presenting on the RISC-V devroom track in Room AW1.126 on Saturday, with the talk starting at 17:15.

Mark will be presenting ‘Buildroot for RISC-V. Using Buildroot to create embedded Linux systems for 64-bit RISC-V’. This talk will be looking at the issues relating to the implementation of RISC-V support, based on his experiences. This will include a look at the status of the RISC-V software ecosystem, with regard to the selection of a suitable tool chain, c library, kernel and bootloader. Mark will be presenting on the RISC-V devroom track in Room AW1.126 on Saturday, with the talk starting at 18:00.

Lewis will be presenting ‘LLVM for the Apollo Guidance Computer’. This talk will be discussing some of the architectural features of the Apollo Guidance Computer followed by an account of his implementation of an LLVM target so far. He will also be discussing the shortcomings faced during this project and how to overcome them. Lewis will be presenting on the LLVM devroom track in Room K.4.201 on Sunday, with the talk starting at 12:45.

For more information about FOSDEM or information on the schedule, please look at their website. If you would like to contact one of the presenters or meet with us in Brussels, please contact us either through our contact form, or email us at info@embecosm.com.