Hi, We here at the Computer Systems Group of the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany are working on an SoC-Kit called SpartanMC.
We are currently using our own port of GCC to compile for it, but would be willing to get our target upstream and maintain it. The SpartanMC architecture poses a few additional difficulties as it is 18 Bits wide. Our investigations have shown that GCC is on principle capable of that (it is working right now, although with several limitations). The main problems are posed by code optimizations that are only applicable for 2^x values such as ... & (obj_align - 1); or d_int.lshift (BITS_PER_UNIT_LOG) Until now, every bug or crash we experienced was caused by such implementations that can very well be rewritten to have correct results no matter the actual value. Also, the current codebase does not seem to be unified in this and already mixes general implementations and ones that only work for powers of 2. Our question now is, whether or not compatibility with our 18 bit architecture and others is something you desire GCC to be capable of in the long term. It would make it much easier for us to use GCC and allow third parties to make much easier use of our work. Further details on SpartanMC: ========================= It is an open source SoC-Kit aimed at running on several FPGAs from various manufacturers with high resource efficiency, which is why it utilizes the 18 bit wide underlying architecture of most FPGAs. In contrast to exisiting SoC-Kits it is completely open source and fully customizable and cross platform instead of targeted only at one specific brand. Even more information can be found on our projects website: spartanmc.de Thanks and regards, Ramon Wirsch
