Wednesday, October 16, 2013

OCP-IP move to Accellera

We're cautiously optimistic, maybe even excited, about the news that went public yesterday of OCP-IP being rolled into Accellera's warm arms. We have participated in technical issues for both; but very much like that Accellera is a proven conduit to IEEE standardization. Open and accessible standards are a good thing. Time will tell, but out of the gate we are pleased that our man years of investment into the OpenCPI Worker Interface Profiles (WIPs), which often incorporate OCP-IP concepts, can live on. Come see us at FPGA-2014 in Monterey to understand why, years later, we still feel the OCP/AXI choice is like Coke and Pepsi.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Ubuntu 13.04 and OpenCPI

We've been using RHEL as our standard Linux for over five years. Initially RHEL5 64b WS, then RHEL6. On the plus side, RHEL is almost always embraced by our CAD and CAE tool vendors as a supported OS. On the minus side, the libraries are as old as the hills and we really weren't feeling the love of sending $200/machine-image/year to Red Hat for this configuration grief. We had noodled in earlier versions of Ubuntu and had some mixed feelings. With Ubuntu 13.04 this past summer, I tried it again and it was just great: everything "just worked". We didn't even have to muck around with GPU drivers. What used to be a half day project of dependency-hell installed in one apt-get. Wow! I don't think of us as OS-bigots; but the understandable contrast between the library hassles we had with something as old as RHEL5 and didn't have with an OS as modern as Ubuntu 13.04 was just too much to overlook. We've started to let our RHEL licenses lapse; just keeping around a few frozen RHEL5s and one maintained RHEL6 so we have them in shop. But unless a client or application needs some other Linux; it's Ubuntu 13.04 in our shop this fall and going forward.

Jim Kulp at Parera did us all a solid by refreshing the OpenCPI mainline to build cleanly to Ubuntu 13.04 as well. Nice! He pushed those changes to the OpenCPI GitHub repo this evening. Thanks Jim!