Alan Feldstein's Blog

The next line from that song is, "Does anybody really care?". Well, the SPARC-V9 Standard Reference Model doesn't care.

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One problem with running a small business is that there is often no one to whom to delegate the tasks that interest me least. While I have heard from some of you about the downside of depending on system administrators, in my opinion there is more upside than downside.

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I wrote that in my last blog about FSS. And I'm still working on the refactoring, letting the compilation failures tell me what work remains. Obviously, since so much time has elapsed without completing this, my current focus is on the other project, but that will change eventually.

The only thing in my notes for the period was a 2009-09-04 entry reminding me to "Guard against writes to memory before POR."

I had an experience with a restaurant in Austin TX USA that I would like to share with this large audience. If you live in or plan to visit Austin, please read. Otherwise, there's not much point.

Please never go to The Hub as long as you live. Here's why.

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Just as I was getting back into what I want to do with Icarus Verilog, I saw a message thread: [Iverilog-devel] Need Icarus test on a 64 bit machine.

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Yes, I was sufficiently recovered from surgery to write SPARC-V9 Standard Reference Model on 2009-06-23. I'm amazed that I was able to do that much that day. Right after that, I came down with a severe cold that put me right back in bed, so June was nearly a complete loss.

Then on 2009-07-08, I started Japanese 2, an accelerated summer course at Austin Community College. That turned my schedule upside down until 2009-08-13. Why am I studying Japanese? I specialize in SPARC-V9 and have developed significant expertise. Fujitsu Limited is a major player in the world of SPARC-V9. They design their SPARC64 microprocessors in Kawasaki, a suburb of Tokyo.

Adding to the squeeze, when Sun's stock price goes up, I spend more time on OpenSPARC, borrowing from the time allocation for FSS. JAVA is up.

That's enough with the excuses. Let me tell you what progress I have been able to make.

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I finished reading Pragmatic Version Control Using Git by Travis Swicegood, from the beginning of the book through Chapter 7 "Working with Remote Repositories". That should have given me all I needed to figure out how to get back in sync with Icarus Verilog, a project to which I had been contributing and intend to continue. The book's Section 7.3 "Keeping Up-to-Date" is most relevant, but that section is quite thin, less than a page long. I had been having a "git pull" failure. Although the book improved my understanding of Git, for this specific failure I was still on my own.

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As written in Mishra is Peterman, there is a list of tasks that I wanted to complete before FSS Version_0-007 release:

...
7.Add rows to ADDTestCases table for each new pairID in operands table.
8.Run automated verification on ADDTestCases.
9.Run automated verification on MULXTestCases, adding test cases as necessary until workload is 8 hours.

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I'm reading Pragmatic Version Control Using Git.

There has been a surge of enthusiasm in recent months, with several people expressing interest in working for Cosmic Horizon. If I were to rank the team members according to level of effort to date, no one would argue that I'm still in first place (e.g. all of the commits so far have come from me), but second place clearly belongs to Dr. Bimal Mishra, an expert in applied mathematics with interest in science and technology. I first introduced you to him in 2007 as J. Peterman. Dr. Mishra didn't do much with Cosmic Horizon for a while, but has since significantly intensified his study of the system. His initial contribution may be in the area of Apache Derby. Cosmic Horizon applications currently access Derby databases using the Embedded Derby JDBC driver. Sooner or later, we are likely to move to the more familiar client/server mode. Dr. Mishra may take us there sooner. Wherever he chooses to contribute, Dr. Mishra's efforts are greatly appreciated.

Now, let me walk you through the progress since my last blog item (Glorified Clerical Workers?) on our primary work.

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