- Mojo fpga tutorial with arduiono ATmega32U4 controller, based upon Spartan 6 XC6SLX9 FPGA, obtainable from sparkfun. The Spartan has a number of 18 bit DSP slices.
- FPGA Tutorial, and further in the site, real development boards are provided
- Papilio boards using the Xilinx Spartan 6 LX FPGA. They have various wings, among which include a logic analyzer, etc
- Spartan FPGA Tutorial book
- snickerdoodle: palm-sized, reconfigurable Linux computer that connects to the real world: ARM + FPGA + Wi-Fi + Bluetooth + 180 I/O
- SpinalHDL: is an open source high-level hardware description language. It can be used as an alternative to VHDL or Verilog and has several advantages over them.
- Digelent FPGA: lots of boards
- MYIR’s 91 x 63mm, $69 “Z-turn Lite” SBC: Low cost Cortex-A9 SBC offers GbE and up to 28K FPGA logic cells
- 2018/02/10 first FPGA design: from fosdem '18, basic course to create a simple FPGA design using OSS tools
- 2018/03/02 Learning Verilog for FPGAs: The Tools and Building an Adder from hackaday - using the Lattice Semiconductor iCEstick
- 2018/06/05 Numato FPGA Accelerated Computing - a range of development boards based upon Xilinx offerings. The interesting aspect here is that boards based on the Artix-7, Kintex - 7 (plus others) have the ability to run a soft CPU called MicroBlaze, which allows a mix of dedicated logic with CPU capabilities on the same chip. If I remember correctly, the Zynq chip runs a dedicated a hard CPU associated with the FPGA array. Numato's web site offers up tutorials as well as relevant links to the Xilinx web site.
- 2018/07/08 DE10-Nano Kit - hardware design platform built around the Intel System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGA
- 2018/07/29 Cheap FPGA Development Boards
Sunday, July 23. 2017
fpga
lldp and qos
While looking at the MACsec information, I came across information about LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) and how it can be used for packet pacing. This is relevant for me as I found that when doing IPSEC encryption from one device to another, it is easy to overrun the receiver's packet buffers if the packets cannot be filtered and decrypted fast enough.
Mellanox has an article called Quality of Service, which discusses Data Center Bridging (DCB), Priority-based Flow Control (PFC), Pause frames, and shared buffers. They use the open source open-lldp. Their hardware seems to be capable of sending pause frames when buffers get too full, something which would help when slower SoC cpus are processing encrypted packets.
The open-lldp wiki has an article on Data Center Bridging (DCB) on Linux. It has very generic notes. But since there is a lldptool-pfc man page, it appears as though functionality is indeed available in Linux.
kvm qemu nbd
- mounting a qemu image: short tutorial uses the nbd module, along with qemu-nbd to mound and view a qcow2 image
- QEMU/Images discusses image types, creating an image, converting images between popular formats, copying an image to physical device for use, when to use multiple images, how to share images, additional info on mounting, as well as obtaining information about the image.
- Virtualization Administration Guide: the Fedora guide, but generic enough to be used on many distributions. Impressive. And covers libvirt tools. With examples from virt-maanger (the gui).
macsec: MAC security (encrypting L2)
When looking at some NetDevConf papers, I opened up MACsec, which is "Encryption for the wired LAN". The biggest advantage illustrated was in a cloud environment where traffic from one guest to another via a third party's infrastructure could be easily and application-transparently encrypted. The slide deck has a number of actual usage examples. Sabrina Dubroca writes an article on the redhat developers blog: MACsec: a different way to encrypt network traffic.
Which, come to think of it, would be a dead simple way to encrypt L2 WAN traffic.
- MACsec Implementation on Linux: an in depth tutorial written by costier ntework engineering.
- MACsec on Linux: another well documented example of using MACsec on Linux.