[Oberon] Oberon FPGA hardware point of view
Jan de Kruyf
jan.de.kruyf at gmail.com
Wed Aug 8 16:37:13 CEST 2018
Chris,
>On the surface this sounds OK but in reality the sheer number of addresses
>involved led us to use a different approach.
I like your way, in that it properly layers the concerns.
But the easier way is to translate the MCU spec file (which for ARM mcu's
and many others is to be gotten in XML format) into a system constants
file. A python program to do that is not difficult to construct.
I have never tried to do it for Oberon, but for Ada it is easy.
Look at this partial sequence (all made automatically as described above)
with System;
package AVR.ATtiny816 is
.
.
------------------------------------------------------------
-- register INTCTRL - Interrupt Control
AC_INTCTRL_Addr : constant Address := 16#676#;
AC_INTCTRL : Unsigned_8;
for AC_INTCTRL'Address use AC_INTCTRL_Addr;
pragma Volatile (AC_INTCTRL);
AC_INTCTRL_Bits : Bits_In_Byte;
for AC_INTCTRL_Bits'Address use AC_INTCTRL_Addr;
pragma Volatile (AC_INTCTRL_Bits);
AC_CMPC_Bit : constant Bit_Number := 0;
AC_CMPC_Mask : constant Unsigned_8 := 16#1#;
-- Analog Comparator 0 Interrupt Enable
.
.
end AVR.ATtiny816;
By the way the 'Bits_In_Byte' type is an 8 bit boolean array. It makes it
easier to program for pins or bits. Unsigned_8 can be understood as
SYSTEM.BYTE. The Pragma Volatile is to stop GCC from optimizing the code
for the register out of existence.
Then the second file:
with AVR.attiny816;
package AVR.MCU renames AVR.attiny816;
And on top of this you can build your IO layer, or whatever you fancy,
without importing System again, also since GCC has smart ways of optimizing
code so that I never have the need to put semi-assembly in my program. This
might vary on the Oberon compiler.
Now I am of course not advertising Ada as a way of life, in fact she is a
very temperamental lady at times, and 'part of the problem' as NW once
remarked. But it is good to compare notes.
j.
On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 3:32 PM, Chris Burrows <chris at cfbsoftware.com> wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> > Walter Gallegos
> > Sent: Wednesday, 8 August 2018 4:04 AM
> > To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch; Walter Gallegos
> > Subject: [Oberon] Oberon FPGA hardware point of view
> >
> > A FPGA hardware designer point of view;
> >
> > In some projects (all my projects) the CPU executes software as
> > coprocessing; in parallel but outside the main data flow of hardware
> > DSP; hardware is faster and more efficient than software DSP.
> >
> > On this scenery, the memory map could change from one project to
> > another project. So, hardware/software designers need certain degree
> > of freedom to access memory mapped areas.
> >
> > I propose two modifications :
> >
> > 1/ Add memory mapped variables
> >
> > VAR [label] : [type] AT [address]
> > VAR [label] : ARRAY [size] OF [type] AT [address]
> >
>
> On the surface this sounds OK but in reality the sheer number of addresses
> involved led us to use a different approach.
>
> Our technique follows Paul Reed's recent advice here i.e. separate all of
> the hardware specific details from everything else into the lowest level
> modules. This has worked out really well for us. It avoids the software
> maintenance nightmare of having to track down / modify hard-coded addresses
> and other hardware-specific details scattered throughout a system.
>
> With the Astrobe for ARM Cortex-M3, M4 and M7 Oberon systems we were faced
> with the prospect of having to maintain hundreds of memory-mapped addresses
> for similar, but different, memory-mapped peripherals for more than 60
> different types of microcontroller from two different manufacturers (NXP
> and
> STMicroelectronics). You might expect to have a couple of different sets of
> common definitions for each manufacturer but we ended up needing 11
> altogether. Not as bad as 60 perhaps but I'm convinced the designers could
> have done a lot better at eliminating inconsistencies.
>
> The scheme we have used is this: There is a single module, called MCU.mod,
> for each family of microcontrollers e.g. LPC176x (NXP Cortex-M3), STM32F7
> (STM Cortex-M7) etc. There are eleven of these, all with the same name but
> stored in a folder named after the microcontroller family.
>
> The *key* feature is: the *only* items contained in the MCU module are
> CONST
> declarations.
>
> Each named constant represents a peripheral register address. Much of the
> time just the base address of each peripheral is different from one MCU to
> another so we take advantage of the fact that CONSTs can contain arithmetic
> expressions. We can then specify a single base address for each device and
> the other related registers are common offsets from that base.
>
> e.g.
>
> for UART0:
>
> U0Base* = 04000C000H;
> U0RBR* = U0Base+000H;
> U0THR* = U0Base+000H;
> U0DLL* = U0Base+000H;
> U0DLM* = U0Base+004H;
> ...
>
> For UART2:
>
> U2Base* = 040098000H;
> U2RBR* = U2Base+000H;
> U2THR* = U2Base+000H;
> U2DLL* = U2Base+000H;
> U2DLM* = U2Base+004H;
> ...
> ...
>
> RBR, THR, DLL, DLM etc. are the names used for each UART function exactly
> as
> used by NXP in their programming reference manual. In case you are
> wondering, yes - RBR, THR and DLL all map to the same absolute address.
>
> Now, just to be different, the corresponding base address for the LPC1347
> family is U0Base* = 040008000H. If that wasn't bad enough, sometimes the
> relative offset addresses are different as well!
>
> There are more than 500 of these definitions in the LPC176x version of
> MCU.mod and there are still a number of peripherals that we have not yet
> included.
>
> Now that we have isolated what is *different* in MCU.mod, we can then
> implement a common hardware-interface module (e.g. Serial.mod) which uses
> these constant definitions, with their generic names, when implementing the
> (still hardware-specific) functions:
>
> IMPORT MCU, SYSTEM;
>
> PROCEDURE PutCh*(ch: CHAR);
> BEGIN
> REPEAT UNTIL SYSTEM.BIT(ULSR, 5);
> SYSTEM.PUT(UTHR, ch)
> END PutCh;
>
>
> The next level up in the module hierarchy is the familiar common
> *hardware-independent* 'Out' module. This works with all the different
> microcontrollers providing functions Out.Char, Out.String. It includes the
> statement:
>
> IMPORT Serial;
>
> And the functions just call PutCh in different ways.
>
> The mechanism that we use to specify which particular MCU.mod and
> Serial.mod
> files are actually used when we compile an application which targets a
> particular family of microcontrollers is to associate the application with
> a
> configuration file containing mcu-specific 'search paths'. An extract from
> the map file for an application called 'Info' shows the consequences:
>
> LPC1769:
> MCU D:\AstrobeM3-v6.4\Lib\LPC1769\MCU.arm
> Out D:\AstrobeM3-v6.4\Lib\General\Out.arm
> Serial D:\AstrobeM3-v6.4\Lib\LPC1769\Serial.arm
> Info D:\AstrobeM3-v6.4\Examples\General\Info.arm
>
> LPC1347:
> MCU D:\AstrobeM3-v6.4\Lib\LPC1347\MCU.arm
> Out D:\AstrobeM3-v6.4\Lib\General\Out.arm
> Serial D:\AstrobeM3-v6.4\Lib\LPC1347\Serial.arm
> Info D:\AstrobeM3\Release\Examples\General\Info.arm
>
> Most of the time the only functions we need to use with these CONST
> addresses are SYSTEM.PUT to write a value, SYSTEM.GET to read a value and
> SYSTEM.BIT to test the value of a single bit.
>
> If multi-byte data needs to be efficiently read or written to an Oberon
> ARRAY or RECORD, SYSTEM.ADR, SYSTEM.COPY and SYSTEM.VAL (or ARRAY OF BYTE
> parameters) are the Oberon features that can be used. Once the conversion
> has been done from a byte-stream to an application-specific Oberon data
> structure at the hardware interface the Oberon data structure can be used
> naturally in the application from then on. It only needs to be converted
> back to a byte-stream when the hardware needs to be updated.
>
> Regards,
> Chris Burrows
> CFB Software
> http://www.astrobe.com
>
>
> --
> Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
> https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
>
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