FEL: Slides from DVClub Bristol September 2010

Last week, we participated in DVClub Sept 2010: “Using Open Source Verification Tools”.

There were over 100 registrations. The feedback from the Bristol site was very good – people really enjoyed the talks and that the technology worked much better. Thank you very much to everyone who worked very hard to organize this event for European engineers, in Bristol, Cambridge and Eindhoven, with remote access too, considered  - see links below for slides.

“Verilator; fast, free, but for me?” Wilson Snyder

“Architecture For Massively Parallel HDL Simulations” Rich Porter, Art of Silicon

“Free Electronic Lab: Hardware engineering made easy” Chitlesh Goorah

“Processor verification using open source tools and the GCC regression test suite: A case study” Dr Jeremy Bennett, founder and CEO of Embecosm

Filed under: events, Free Electronic Lab, On the News

Report from France: FEL at JM2L – Nov 27-28 2009

Fedora Electronic Lab and Upstream developers were represented by Laurent Charpentier, whom I sincerely thank for his presentation last friday and booth attendance. Photos in this blog post are from Animatrix30.

Report of the JM2L 2009 event in Sophia-Antipolis, France – Nov 27-28 2009

by Laurent Charpentier

The JM2L event (Journée Méditerranéennes du Logiciel Libre), dedicated to opensource software, took place at the University of Nice-Sophia, France.

Sophia-Antipolis, one of Europe’s largest technology parks, is home to hundreds of high tech companies, primarily in information technology, telecommunications and biotechnology fields.

Exhibitors came on Friday morning to set-up the booths. We had about 15 booths including one for Fedora Project (and Fedora Electronic Lab sub-project).

Booth setup:

Doors opened on Friday afternoon with a good mix of visitors coming from the University (students, teachers) and professionals from the Sophia technology park.

The event had 30 conferences, 6 technical workshops. Several rooms were also set-up for Linux installation (“install party”) and video games (“LAN party”).

At the Fedora booth I presented Fedora 12 and Fedora Electronic Lab 12, the latest version of these distributions. Most of the Fedora visitors at the booth came to know about FEL. HDL design, simulation and PCB design were among the fields of interest. I gave some demos of Kicad (PCB) and KtechLab (simulation). I also had questions about Fedora distribution: what is Fedora? what is Fedora compared to Ubuntu? I also had one installation to perform on a (old) Samsung X30 notebook, but the F12/F11/F10 live CDs failed to run (X server failed to run). It worked however on Ubuntu the previously installed OS.

On Friday I gave a presentation of Fedora and Fedora Electronic Lab (presentation is available on FEL’s website, pictures on flickr using “jm2l09″ and “fedora” tags). I had about 20 persons attending the presentation, some of them were Electrical Engineers from local semiconductor companies (Infineon, Texas-Instruments, ST-Ericsson, …). The attendants were very pleased to know about the FEL initiative: it is now easier to find opensource tools that are ready to use.

Some of the questions were: why some projects are not included in FEL (systemC, Scilab, openaccess, …)? It is due to licensing restrictions. Does FEL work closely with FPGA vendors to use/integrate opensource tools into their design flow?

Overall, JM2L was a good event promoting opensource software and strengthening the opensource community. JM2L had a lot of conferences including technical sessions and workshops to present opensource software to a broad range of visitors.

Laurent Charpentier

Filed under: events, Free Electronic Lab

22nd Interop Forum: 1/3 of EDA software is pirated

Karen Bartleson reports some interesting facts from the 22nd EDA Interoperability forum in her blog.

Richard Paw represented the EDA Consortium’s OS Roadmap Committee. This group produces guidelines for operating system and hardware platforms that help unify EDA tool support around common platforms. (It drives customers crazy when the tools they purchase don’t support the same platforms.) The guidelines will be updated in September 2010. Added will be SLES 11 (SuSe Linux) and Windows 7. Dropped will be SLES 10. In 6 months, the committee will review Windows XP, Vista, and the upcoming RHEL 6 (RedHat Enterprise Linux).

Dave Graubart represented the EDA Consortium’s Anti-Piracy Committee. He said it’s hard to feel the love when you’re getting ripped off. The committee estimates that 1/3 of all EDA software use worldwide is pirated or overused beyond the license agreements. Not scientific data, but troubling nevertheless for the EDA industry. It’s easy to find the stolen binaries so most of the 1/3 estimate comes from this, not misuse/overuse which is harder to find. There are potential techniques to help prevent this piracy and the committee will continue its work to solve the problem.

Filed under: eda, events

LinuxTag/FUDCon Berlin 2009 – Sunday

Saturday night/Sunday morning, from 02h00 to 03h00 I prepared my slides.

On sunday, I was the only one scheduled for a presentation, while the day was reserved for hackfests. I wanted to take the opportunity (since there are Fedora contributors from various continents) to report back to the community about the progress made behind Fedora Electronic Lab.

Normally, I use PDF for my presentations. But that I was using the slides directly from openoffice3.1. I was surprised with the beamer features it has.

Most of the heads whom I was hoping to attend my Report were not present, I changed the orientation of my Report towards a presentation instead. It is sad, because many people know of FEL as just a collection of EDA tools, which it absolutely not the case. I said this couple of times before. After my presentation, Fedora Italians, Greg, Max,Jeroen and I had a chat in the park about a new way of marketing via Xuropa.

Bert, Jeroen and I spent some time on the spin maintainers’s reponsibilities and wikipages. Wow, Fedora wiki got a lot features since I was heavily using it during the time of Kadischi.

FUDCon is always an exciting moment for a Fedora contributor. I always enjoy good moments with Fedora EMEA members, whom I have great respect for. A big thank you to MaxSpevack, GeroldKassube, JoergSimon and the rest of the Fedora Linuxtag crew for making this FUDCon a success.

Filed under: fedora, Free Electronic Lab, FUDCon

LinuxTag/FUDCon Berlin 2009 – Saturday

Saturday started with a delicious german breakfast with ChristophWickert, SebastianDziallas and a LXDE developer. LXDE was on the table. I was trying to reboot my brain while my body was seeking for a bed. At about 09h15, I followed the Fedora wave to the Berlin Messe.

There everyone was showing me the FEL Flyers , while Mo put a Fedora tattoo on her cheek. I went straight to a neighbouring booth about FPGA, to learn more about the EDA tools they use. To my astonishment, they haven’t heard of FEL. So I gave them a basic introduction of our objectives behind FEL, from my point of view, they were not very enthusiast with it. It was the same feeling when you are asking an Altera fanboy to use Xilinx ISE to timing analysis.

I went to the KDE booth to tell them that FEL is KDE-based and that I want to learn more future power optimizations and boot time optimizations for the upcoming releases. However, I got the confirmation about a theory on KDE developers, “You will never have productive discussion with KDE developers, if you said there is something wrong about KDE.” I have this theory since I was a KDE booth member at CeBit 2007 in Hannover. I was firm on the fact that I was not only a user, but a KDE distributor as well. But the only respond I got was to ask my users to upgrade their hardware. Well, if KDE is juicing to much about Fedora (gnome) desktop, then there is a problem with KDE. I pointed the fact that RexDieter and FedoraKDE had worked a lot to improve KDE’s boot time. The discussion was not going anywhere, so I ended it and head to the Fedora booth. I was a booth staff from 12:00 to 14:00 as per ThomasWoerner’s sheet. There, I showed Mo how I used their early work on Fedora Community website for Fedora Electronic Lab’s website. She instantly pointed out some improvements and suggested a sublogo for FEL.

Then I want to fetch my FUDCon M-size t-shirt from MaxSpevack. Someone stole my M-size t-shirt and finally got a XL I caught JoergSimon and we went to have lunch with AndreasRau. It is always a pleasure to sit down with Joerg and chat with him. While we were heading to Mo’s “Fedora Community” presentation, GregDeKoniegsberg caught us on the hallway asking assistance with the beamer for his presentation. Ultimately, I gave Greg’s my laptop for his presentation and I stayed with him, while Joerg went to Mo’s presentation.

During the last 2 hours of Linuxtag, I went every electronic hardware related booth to learn more about their projects and the set of EDA tools they use. Among those were, Beagleboard of TexasInstrument, OpenEmbedded and a robotics booth. I am amazed that none knew of FEL’s existence. It is a real issue that openhardware community are unaware of the opensource solutions Fedora Electronic Lab provides. Another item on the my todo list.

I went to one of the last sessions (2nd day FUDCon) about the spins with JeroenVanMeeuven. You can read the meeting minutes here. I shared my intention of a possible migration of FEL Livedvd from KDE-based to Gnome based. After that, we headed to the hotel and then with the germans we went to eat real meat. After dinner, some of us went to the Ubuntu BBQ for which we received an invitation at the booth. There, it was very silent. I spent some quality time with Lennart, who introduced himself as the one who breaks my pulseaudio.

Filed under: fedora, linuxtag, FUDCon

LinuxTag/FUDCon Berlin 2009 – Friday evening

I was not supposed to visit LinuxTag this year and but finally I managed to come on Friday evening, 27 June 2009 (special thanks to those who encouraged me). It was also the first day for Fedora’s FUDCon Berlin 2009 session (the most exciting part of LinuxTag09).

I was supposed to give a presentation (about Fedora Electronic Lab) Friday morning, however due to some personal reasons, I could only manage to come on Saturday. My apologies to those who came to my presentation on Friday. However during the week, MaxSpevack and I exchanged some phone calls so that he could takeover my presentation and show how Fedora is the ideal platform to excel in promoting innovative ideas (FEL, in this case) based on free and opensource software. Special thanks to MaxSpevack.

On the way to check-in at the hotel, I met YaakovNemoy, BertDesmet and a few other Fedora contributors. To my surprise, I got the chance to meet JohnMcDonough and his son, JP. Thanks, to JohnMcDonough who reminded me before the freeze of F-11 release notes to write the release notes for FEL. After check-in, I went straight to my room and met my room mate. I was only able to manage a 2 minutes of chit-chat with him when GeroldKassube knocked at the door to fetch me for the Fedora’s social event, FUDPub.

We arrived around 19h30 at the FUDPub. I was shocked by the number of new faces I could not recognized (149 Fedorans subscribed). I barely shared a hug with Max. Most of the usual Fedora EMEA(aside the French) were having chit-chats with their beers. The germans as usual started pointing to me that I was missing something, beer . Out of the blue pizza came to the table, so I took a piece and talked with Kanarip, JP, JohnMcDonough and a few others I didn’t even knew their names. I made a small trip to all the tables saying “hi” to everyone I knew. The waiter came with a vegetarian pizza and no-one was eager to eat it. So I took the pizza to MairinDuffy, knowing the fact that Ray and she have a blog about vegetarian food. Hence I managed to talk to her and JesseKeating for a few seconds, when Kanarip and I engaged into a deep conversation (specially about FEL’s Statistics) and lost completely track of what others were doing. At about 01h00, everyone was gone except the Fedora Italians and AlasdairKergon. In accordance to AndreasThienemann, they went to better places.

Filed under: fedora, linuxtag, FUDCon

Sublogo for FEL by Fedora Design team

During FUDConBerlin09, MairinDuffy mentioned some minor tweaks and recommendations to the design of the FEL website and on Fedora Hosted.

She designed the following sublogo (from official Fedora sublogo template) for the upper left corner of the site so the top header area can be a bit cleaner. Thanks Mo.

Filed under: artwork, fedora, Free Electronic Lab, FUDCon

FEL’s Events in May

Our Fedora ambassador team has dedicated their time and effort to introduce you new features coming with Fedora 11. They have been organizing and attending several events in your locality and in your local language.

These ambassadors recently gave talks and demonstrations about Fedora Electronic Lab in Greece and India.

8 May 2009 – FOSSCOMM 2009 – Larissa, Greece By Kostas Antonakoglou
Fedora Electronic Lab was introduced and a work flow demonstration was conducted to show how electronic design can be achieved efficiently with opensource software. — Blog Report

14-15 May 2009 at Dr. B.C Roy Engineering College, India By Rangeen Basu, Subhodip Biswas, Arindam Ghosh, Ratnadeep Debnath and Kishan Goyal
FEL was deployed under 30 computers to demonstrate gsim85, Ktechlab, octave, piklab, gresistor, drawtiming, ghdl, … FEL LiveDVDs were distributed freely.. – — Blog Report 1 — Blog Report 2 — Blog Report 3 — Blog Report 4 — Blog Report 5

On the 31 May 2009, in Malaysia, at the “Red Hat brings you Fedora Activity Day During MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2009″, Mohammad Razi will give an overview about Fedora Electronic Lab.

Filed under: events, Free Electronic Lab

Report: FEL @ FOSDEM 2009

Last weekend was one of the unique moments in Fedora’s history that we were more than 30 Fedora contributors at a single event, FOSDEM 2009.

Friday

I met Joerg, Aanjhan and Robert at Brussels Central Station and we had a quick dinner before heading to the beer event, the famous Delirium. It felt so good to meet the rest of the fedora crew, Gerold, Jeroen, Stephan, the Greeks, the italians, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Germans, the Americans, and the rest of the fedora contributors from the small planet called Earth. Afterwards some of us headed to another bar to chit-chat. Jeroen convinced me to co maintained a p0rn package and I was too tired to ask why.

Saturday

I woke up at 07h00 to prepare my presentation about FEL which was for 14h00. At 09h00 I headed to Brussels along with beers for Papadeas Pierros. I promised Papadeas those beers because he printed and brought FEL flyers.

Before the first presentation could start, I was able to pay a visit to most booths to see what is new in terms of opensource software and meet some people I know of from other projects. Some of my remarks are the following:

• Fedora had the most head counts and its booth was Sugar/OLPC oriented most of the time. I would have wished more talks about Fedora endless features. But needless to say, Fedora has the most professional community booth. Thanks to the annual FAD at Rheinfelden, organized by Gerold. As you can see, this EMEA FAD which is outside any linux event, helps us focus on the main Fedora Marketing strategies and how to GET THINGS DONE !
• The second in terms of the most professional booth is to me undoubtedly the Opensuse Booth
• The rest of the booths talked about vaguely the same thing (the old technologies) and that they are good but didn’t explain why. GNOME had its usual “stick-it” strategy to hear from people and KDE was simply there.

FOSDEM IS SMALL FOR FEDORA !!! There had been many Fedora presentations with the devroom filled up and leaving people sitting on the floor. FOSDEM Organizers should acknowledge that Fedora is a community builder and that FOSDEM has been one of the Fedora EMEA contributors meeting place. During the last 4 years, the number of Fedora contributors attending officially FOSDEM is doubled each year. Soon the Moore’s Law could even be applied. Next year, we should ask for a big devroom and receive it.

Christoph did a RPM Packaging crash course in one hour. I stepped in at 14h00 to talk about Fedora Electronic Lab.

My Presentation can be downloaded from here.

My objective about this presentation was “Opensource Software is NOT enough !“. I explain: in the opensource software community, people are proud of “it is opensource software”. But in the real life situation, where software is simply a tool to get the job done, irrespective to its license, being proud is not enough. Getting things done with Opensource software is more important.

I explained how Fedora’s grounding principles and maturity has helped in creating Fedora Electronic Lab and why there has not been such initiative before. In one sentence, Fedora Electronic Lab tends to focus on giving hardware design methodologies with opensource EDA tools and help to foster a community around the opensource EDA community.

I have also covered some sensible topics (with respect to what the opensource software community does not want to hear. E.g.:

• Chip designers does not have the luxury to choose his/her linux distribution for hardware design. (c.f EDA Consortium Roadmap)
• In terms of features/hardware algorithms and methodologies, there is no progress in EDA tools. However proprietary software does, only because they need to keep their business model alive and they have millions of Euros to spend. But with FEL, we are trying to bring those design methodologies to light with existing opensource software which people have not heard from. All these cost time to study the market trend. Thereby, there is one slide on my presentation describing the time spent on FEL development and how Fedora’s maturity helps us to spend less time testing non-EDA software and give users the best and the latest hardware design and simulation platform.
• Agree that all Hardware Languages win, else choose another career orientation.

This is the unfortunate truth about hardware design and in the end what really matters for the user is not the software but

• the hardware being created
• the development time versus EDA deployment time

by the software.

Since one hour is not enough, I had to briefly cover everything and talked about how community like gEDA/gaf are striving hard to bring an amazing set of tools to the opensource community. I covered a bit about my own field chip design at low-level hardware design and how to use different tools at different stage of the design flow. Oh yes, TCL and perl are meant for hardware designers, else it is software development. I took 5/10 mins of MrTom’s hour slot, sorry to answer a few questions.

I got of the room with a Debian guy who was very excited with FEL’s commitment and wished that we could provide more embedded solutions. It was nice talking to him and we shared some common goals. Then, I headed to Max’s presentation who was explaining the 4 F in the Fedora Community. One of the F reflects “Friends” and anyone can clear acknowledge that Fedora contributors are a bunch of Friends all striving towards the same goals and get the job done together with an exciting and lively community.

To my surprise JonathanRiddell attended my presentation and actually I had a slide on Umbrello about how to make Project-specific perl scripts and design methodology with UML. Umbrello is currently maintained by Jonathan. I believe he was happy that someone did talk about his software.

I also met KrisBruytaert who invited to planet grep be. The rest of the saturday was spent wishing MrTom’s Happy Birthday, attending Greg’s presentation, talked to many people at the Fedora Booth. Some people were either already using FEL or helping others use FEL. There was one man who is shipping each month a DVD with FEL updates to his brother in India. A lot of people were asking for more embedded solutions. At night, I recommended a few people kwak and its glass. It was well appreciated by Fedorans.

Sunday

I was at the booth in the morning and afterwards got drifted away from the booth as I meant a few people I know from different linux events. Constantly, I was reminding Max and Greg that they have been booked for a little chit-chat about FEL. With Max and Greg, we discussed about FEL Livedvds and the bridge that FEL is creating between two open communities. Greg was more interested what kind of business model FEL could provide. Greg, Sebastian, some OLPC contributors and I got dumped into a place to eat something. It was only at the end, when Greg realised where he was. To my surprise, Spot was also at FOSDEM and we headed to the FOSDEM bar for a drink and talking about licenses. I was planning to release my SystemC SRPM without the source on my fedorapeople account. Spot recommended MIT.

I also met a CentOS contributor who was eager to repackage gEDA for CentOS. I didn’t understand the reason behind this, because I am also maintaining gEDA packages for the EPEL EL-5 branch. In accordance to him and another CentOS developer, EPEL is not 100% compatible with CentOS. I was hoping to catch DagWieers to confirm it. I also heard rumours (based on my complete ignorance on the topic) that CentOS is no longer just rebuilding RHEL packages.

Aanjhaan and I spent some time alone exchanging some views about the event, users requests, feedbacks and how we can shape all this in time for F-11. It was nice to meet him in real life and you can see he like learning new things
Finally, Fabian informed me that he kicked me out of the 20 top fedora packagers list. It felt so good to meet everyone and talked about some fedora related discussions and personal things as the friendship strengthens.

Filed under: fosdem

FEL at FOSDEM’09

As you have noticed more than 30 Fedora contributors confirmed their attendance for FOSDEM’09 this year. FOSDEM’09 will be a place for you to meet our outstanding crew and share your views with us.

I’ll be having an one-hour slot in the Fedora+Centos devroom on Saturday to talk about FEL. I’ll be covering how by thinking beyond software:

• we are getting things done to improve design experience with opensource software
• FEL is solving problems and lacks in the opensource EDA community since 4 years now
• we are giving our upstream projects marketing means.
• ..

Please feel free to ask me any questions with respect to FEL during FOSDEM or even during my presentation at 14:00 to 15:00 Saturday 7 February 2009.

Filed under: fosdem, Free Electronic Lab