G'evening,

I'm Sevis, a secondary school student from Russia, currently living in the Netherlands. I'm mostly interested in Linux and programming, currently working on a designing a processor. Was invited to the local IRC channel by HiddenKnowledge, and this place looked fun.

Hi, Sevis

Welcome to Niftyhost Sevis. :)
I am sure you are going to enjoy this place.
Just be sure to stick to the rules. :P

Heya Sevis! Welcome to NH! :)

Hey Sevis, Welcome to Nifty Host!

(06-30-2010, 03:06 AM)Sevis Wrote: ... I'm mostly interested in Linux and programming, currently working on a designing a processor...

(06-30-2010, 03:22 AM)Sevis Wrote: ...am writing my own assembly language.

*Cough* I wonder whether writing "your own" assembly language (I comprehend this as developing your own instruction set, is it?) makes much sense if no manufacturer decides to create a series of processors with your instruction set. :)
Also, I'm a bit curious: Which type of processor are you designing?

1. CISC, or RISC?
   
2. 4-bit? 8-bit? 16-bit? 32-bit? 64-bit? 128-bit?
   
3. For your custom instruction set: Length of instruction words?
   
4. Length of Opcode?
   
5. Hardwired control unit, or Microcode control unit?
   
6. Are there any caches present in your processor? I hope I won't hear you want to use 8GB of SRAM as cache. :) Most people would have no interest in buying a processor that costs more than a million dollars.
   
7. How many registers are planned?
   

Also, glad to see another Linuxer. Linuxers are getting a lot of more younger recently and I feel competed. :) Which distribution are you using? Debian, Arch, LFS, Gentoo, Slackware, or any other derivations?

Hi, Sevis

Thanks, everyone.

RichardGv, yep, I'm designing my own instruction set, plus writing a program to run the machine code (mostly to test whether the instruction set is sane), plus writing an assembler, plus either making a circuit in TkGate or programming a FPGA. I'm currently leaning towards the TkGate option, designing some basic peripherals seems easier than making the thing interact with real hardware (and besides, I doubt it'll be something that will be used in PCs).

To answer your questions one by one:

1. CISC
   
2. 32-bit data bus, address bus, and largest register (although still subject to change, it started out as 4-bit...)
   
3. 32-bit words for pretty much everything.
   
4. 8-bit opcode, can be expanded to 9-bit later (instruction has one free bit)
   
5. Microcode control unit
   
6. No cache planned for now.
   
7. 128 addresses, half of them user addressable, about evenly split between 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit. Actually comes out as less, as many are parts of others (for example, 8-bit register B0 is the least significant byte in 32-bit register W0).
   

I have the feeling that by the time I finish this processor, I'll be horrified by how awful it is, and will remake large parts: most notably the registers and 32-bit multiplication (shifting instead of looped adding). On the other hand, things have been developing steadily, although I've had the feeling I couldn't possibly manage to do anything more in the time I have available: this is a school project, and is due in December.

I've got a Google Code page set up for this architecture, http://code.google.com/p/sevarch/, if you're interested. Once I've got an assembler and emulator/simulator (machine code interpreter) going, I'll write a C compiler and kernel for this thing.

I'm a Gentoo user as well, but have an LFS machine I play around with occasionally.

(06-30-2010, 10:41 AM)RichardGv Wrote: Also, glad to see another Linuxer. Linuxers are getting a lot of more younger recently and I feel competed. :) Which distribution are you using? Debian, Arch, LFS, Gentoo, Slackware, or any other derivations?

You never asked. :P
* HiddenKnowledge uses linux too whenever possible.

(06-30-2010, 07:05 PM)Sevis Wrote: I'm a Gentoo user as well, but have an LFS machine I play around with occasionally.

Cool. I don't use LFS because it's harder to maintain (no package management system), and there's not a centralized place in which I can ask about problems related to all packages.

(06-30-2010, 07:15 PM)HiddenKnowledge Wrote: You never asked. :P
* HiddenKnowledge uses linux too whenever possible.

Well, I remember last time we talked, months ago, you were not using Linux. (The time that I complained about kernel configuration issue). So, you are using Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mint, or something surprising?
So many Linux users... When someday everybody is using Linux, I will probably consider migrating to BSD. :)