We are six weeks into Google Summer of Code now and have seen some great progress from our students. The goal of Google Summer of Code is to get students involved in open source communities, which is very valuable for communities of a size like ours.
In the following I want to summarize the progress of the students and where to find the work and documentation. We are looking forward to a successful second half of Google Summer of Code.
Code quality metrics for projects listed on LibreCores.org
Student: Amitosh Swain Mahapatra
The goal of Amitosh's project is to display useful information of a project activity and metadata on LibreCores.org. Beside that he has made significant contributions to the general setup of LibreCores.org. His contributions so far led to 5 pull requests into the main code base: #145, #147, #149, #150, #152
You can follow Amitosh's work on gitter, the librecores dev mailing list and most importantly his blog. Also see his latest blog post.
EDSAC Museum on FPGA
Student: Hatim Kanchwala
Hatim works on replicating one of the first generation tube-based computers, the EDSAC. The goal is to bring it up on the MyStorm FPGA board. He makes great progress on replicating the machine and the results will become a ChipHack workshop in September around ORConf.
You can best follow Hatim's work on his Github repository, on Gitter and on his blog.
Integration of OpenRISC Linux Port into OpTiMSoC
Student: Pedro Henrique Penna
Pedro works on porting OpenRISC Linux into the Open Tiled Manycore System-on-Chip. Linux runs in a specialized subsystem that interacts with the user and a driver encapsulates the communication with the other processing resources.
Pedro works on a series of Github repositories to fulfill this task and you can best interact with him on Gitter.
Updating Sodor
Student: Kritik Bhimani
Kritik proposed to update the Sodor repository of RISC-V teaching cores to the recent RISC-V specifications and an updated major version of the Chisel hardware construction language. This task has a very high impact as many people are interested in this repository to get started with RISC-V.
You can best follow Kritik's work in his repository and on Gitter. Kritik has recently created a larger pull request with the majority of the tasks completed and documents his work on his blog.
High-level bitstream format for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs
Student: Roland Lutz
Roland works on the icestorm FPGA implementation flow and targets at a high-level description of the bitstream as a more useful, human-readable representation. He also works on improving the documentation of the tool.
Roland works on his Github repository and recently got his first pull request into icestorm.