10 Years Later

 Almost 10 years later.

I have done a few things in the past decade but I won't go back in time to detail them. I will use this space as a kind of engineering log. I will explain the details of the past as they become relevant.

Now I'm a PhD student at UBC in computer engineering, so I will write about the things I'm working on as they become relevant.

My thesis proposal is basically about how to build a computer that doesn't rely on a CPU for system management tasks. I won't get into 'why' right now, but you can read my paper from HotOS'21 if you want to get some hints.

This past month, I have been working on implementing a virtio controller in an FPGA. I didn't really intend to go this deep into the world of hardware but it was a slippery slope of decisions. I am not a hardware designer - I have never worked on an FPGA before and never written in verilog. I have a decent base code to work from and a vague idea of what needs to be done to it. I'm working on the Daisy board (from CRZ) that uses a fairly large Xilinx FPGA and a lot of RAM.

I managed to add my very own register to the design! It is accessible from the built-in ARM processors (over the AXI bus) so now I can communicate with the firmware.

My next goal is to read some values from the PCIe config space from the ARM processor. That will require a bit more logic and also understanding how to interact with the Xilinx PCIe core.