Background I have been working on adding RISC-V 64-bit architecture support to Buildroot. Buildroot is an embedded Linux build system that generates complete system images from source for a wide range of boards and processors. Buildroot uses makefiles… Read More
I recently attended the GNU Tools Cauldron in Manchester, where Roger Espasa from Esperanto Technologies and I ran a BoF session on GCC support for the RISC-V Vector (V) extension. This is an interesting topic, because the V… Read More
My name is Katie Bennett and this summer I had the wonderful opportunity to work for Embecosm in between my A-levels and university. My objective was to create a remote weather station to use as a case study for the… Read More
Hi, I’m Sam Leonard, and I’m going into my second year of A-levels. I’m at Embecosm for a week as a work experience student, working on producing an exploit as a proof of concept for the Stack Erase feature that… Read More
This year Embecosm will be hosting the GNU Tools Cauldron between the 6th and the 9th September in Manchester, UK. Manchester is home of the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), Vimto, Alan Turing statue, Turing’s clock, the suffragettes, multiple football clubs… Read More
The RISC-V workshop in Barcelona starts at lunchtime today, 7 May. I'll be there with my colleagues Graham Markall, Mary Bennett and Ian Loveless. We'll be talking particularly about upstreaming GDB for RISC-V and building CGEN based assemblers and simulators. To mark the occasion, I thought it would be useful to provide a short survey of the free and open source RISC-V ecosystem. Read More
Embecosm was registered as a Company ten years ago today on 25 April 2008. From our initial contract developing GDB for the Epiphany multicore processor, we have grown to developing full LLVM and GNU tool chains for some of the world's best known processors. Read More
On Saturday 14th April, HackSoton was once again hosted in Central Hall, Southampton. Now in its 9th iteration, it continues to be a day of hacking and helping, whether its working on a project… Read More
The compiler tool chain is one of the largest and most complex components of any system, and increasingly will based on open source code, either GCC or LLVM. On a Linux system only the operating system kernel and browser will have more lines of code. For a commercial system, the compiler has to be completely reliable—whatever the source code, it should produce correct, high performance binaries. So how much does producing this large, complex and essential component cost? Thanks to open source not as much as you might think. In this post I provide a real world case study, which shows how bringing up a new commercially robust compiler tool chain need not be a huge effort. Read More
I have been accepted to give one of the Main Track talks at FOSDEM 2018 on EDSAC and Chip Hack 2017! Hooray! FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting. It is a free-to-attend annual event… Read More