Thursday, 2020-06-04

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lambdaclaire isn't usually in here, right? I'd really like to start working on memory stuff, but without knowing what she wants it to look like, I fear anything I do might be for naught11:21
Loftylambda: correct, but you can ask her on Twitter or by email11:23
whitequarkwhy not use github for discussing code?11:23
lambdawhitequark: that's where the discussion stalled a few days ago, not sure if she even saw it11:24
whitequarkyeah sometimes that happens11:26
lambdaeh, guess I'll poke her on twitter in a day or two11:28
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thardinhas anyone here fiddled with the MAX11300 by any chance?19:02
thardin20-channel PIXI mixed-signal thingy19:02
thardinnm I figured it out. the R/W bit is 0 for write, 1 for read19:04
az0redaveshah: Wow, that is really fucked up19:09
az0reWTF is Lattice thinking19:09
az0reThey should have gone all-in on open source tooling19:09
az0reThey should be doing the job you have done/are doing, or at least helping you19:09
az0reAlmost certainly a decision by some idiot MBA19:10
az0reI think you should play hardball with them.  Declare your intention to stop work on Lattice products and do everything you can to assert your IP rights, work with Claire, etc. to remove your work from future versions of Yosys and SymbiFlow19:11
az0reIf they want to poke you in the eye for doing great work to expand their market for them, fuck them19:12
az0reMaybe it's time to consider GPL for Yosys19:13
az0reBespoke commercial licenses available for purchase from Symbiotic EDA19:13
daveshahI don't think Lattice will really care if Yosys et al loses support for them - they might even be happier - but I'm definitely not working on support for the new lattice parts any more19:18
daveshahIf Yosys goes GPL then I will maintain an ISC fork, that doesn't solve anything19:18
daveshahI'm waiting to see what happens with various contacts first, maybe we can get a U-turn or better from Lattice19:19
az0reDo you know who actually made the decision?19:20
daveshahNo idea19:20
daveshahI've had no direct contact with Lattice yet19:20
az0reI understand completely how you feel about the license.  But this is basically your only leverage.  They benefit from the work you did and are now flipping you the bird.  IMO you should play your cards.19:21
az0reYou've gotta impose some sort of cost as a deterrence, even if they don't see it as a deterrent right now19:21
daveshahA few contacts who buy in at least medium volume from Lattice are trying to see what they can do19:21
az0reCool19:21
thardinuse AGPL  to really piss them off19:22
az0reBut I doubt they'll be able to do anything19:22
daveshahI don't see how GPL/AGPL solves anything here19:22
az0reWell, there are two ideas here:19:22
az0re1) Change licenses19:22
daveshahIt seems like Lattice _don't_ want people to use Yosys so making they won't care if we make it harder to use Yosys19:23
az0re2) Remove lattice support from future versions of Yosys/SymbiFlow19:23
daveshahI think the only way to success is to try and explain a tangible link between open source tools and sales19:23
az0reCorrect, they don't like this alternative implementation.  But they do like the increased revenue from having a part compatible with a fully open source toolchain.  They may not recognize the link.  Make it clear.19:23
daveshahAt the end of the day that is all they care about19:23
az0reRight19:24
az0reIf that open source toolchain no longer supports their chips, people buying for open source compatibility will stop buying19:25
az0reYou don't have to remove support from old versions, even if it were possible19:25
az0reJust the fact that support will decay, no new features will be added, etc. will be enough of a deterrent19:25
daveshahWell, that will happen by default now19:25
az0reFor new chips, yes19:26
daveshahI can't add support for any of the further fancy new FPGAs supposed to be coming out soon19:26
az0reBut if current chips are not supported in new Yosys versions19:26
thardinyou could try and ask them whether they're a hardware company or a software company19:26
thardinget them to focus on the hardware side19:27
az0reI think that would go nowhere.  I am not privy to the dicussion about making these changes, but IIUC FPGA vendors are so clammy about specs because they're worried about patent lawsuits and think that it will be easier to find material to litigate with an open implementation of a toolchain19:29
az0reSo, they're a hardware company, but they want to control relevant software, too19:30
daveshahThere's a perennial worry of people making bitstream compatible clones, too19:30
az0reActually that leads to another potential point of leverage: Tell them you're pissed, why, and that you will now spend all your reverse engineering effort looking for patent infringement, which you will happily forward to Xilinx, Intel, and MicroSemi19:30
daveshahPeople in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, god knows what the patent situation is for Yosys/nextpnr19:31
az0reI know what the patent situation is for Yosys/nextpnr19:32
az0reIrrelevant for noncommercial uses19:32
thardinalso irrelevant for anywhere but the US19:32
thardinor at least in EU19:32
sorearlattice announced $97 million in revenue in 2020Q119:33
az0reYosys and nextpnr would also only be vulnerable to software patent claims19:33
sorearhow much of that do you think was from people using nextpnr19:33
az0reI don't know what Lattice's patent portfolio looks like, but I doubt they have many software patents19:34
thardinwhat a swell system this is where groups of people can't share work because reasons19:35
smkzwhats the state of open source toolchain support for xilinx parts; i had been considering using an ecp5 for a design because of open source toolchain support but with this stuff going on i'm wondering if i should reconsider ;;19:39
daveshahIt's more experimental, but improving19:40
thardinI got the arty 35t board, seems there's support for htat19:42
az0redaveshah: Your GitHub profile pic IIRC is an Artix-200T.  is that supported?19:44
daveshahThat's from years ago! But X-ray should support it now, I think a few nextpnr patches would be needed for it to work19:44
daveshahI've been more working on improving the general scalability at the moment, rather than arch-specific stuff19:45
az0reCool19:46
az0reActually I have one sitting around.  Maybe in a couple weeks I'll try to start using it.  If I encounter any problems, I'll be sure to let you know.19:46
* smkz nods19:47
smkzwhat's the biggest (in terms of logic / dsp and maybe serdes) xilinx fpga that's supported or will soon be supported by yosys/nextpnr (or other open source tools)19:48
daveshahIf you don't care about open bitstream generation yet, vu13p soon19:48
* smkz nods19:50
az0reAnd what about with open bitstream generation? End-to-end open source?19:51
daveshahxc7a200t for now19:51
daveshahI think X-ray should get k325 support fairly soon19:51
az0reGot it19:51
az0reThanks :)19:51
az0reI was previously interested in Lattice because they seemed to "get it" and be on board the open source train.  But now that it's clear they are not, well, if I'm going to be working with assholes, I'd at least like to work with the assholes with the best products.19:52
smkztbh that thing with lattice makes me really sad because the open source toolchain (yosys and arachne-pnr) was pretty much what got me into fpgas with an ice40 ;-;19:52
az0reI don't understand this business decision.19:53
daveshahI honestly have no idea what happened at Lattice. There are/were definitely senior people on board, but also some senior people against open tools19:53
az0reNow what do they have to differentiate them in the market?19:53
sorearright hand, left hand, etc etc19:53
thardindoes anyone have a link to info on what exactly lattice is doing? I'm missing enough backlog19:54
daveshahhttps://twitter.com/fpga_dave/status/126849742850172518419:54
somlohttps://lwn.net/Articles/817619/  (sort-of applicable in this context as well :)19:54
tpbTitle: An uproar over the Fedora Git forge decision [LWN.net] (at lwn.net)19:54
az0rehttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZqbnocXsAMHCd0.png19:54
daveshahOne possible reason for Lattice including this is they are trying to promote their parts for platform security19:55
thardinah19:55
thardinyeah that's some bs19:55
daveshahI guess maybe they think open bitstreams will make their parts "less secure"19:55
thardinI guess they don't understand that security through obscurity doesn't work19:55
daveshahI don't know if this is true. But currently this SDK targets their security-oriented part (xo3d)19:56
az0reIf so, that's extra hilarious, as what thardin says is true: If they think lack of open source toolchains helps to secure their products, the security of their products should be *less* trusted19:57
az0reBecause clearly they don't know what they're doing lol19:57
thardinyep19:58
az0reXilinx gets pilloried for the constant breaks in its bitstream decryption19:58
az0reBut Ithey're getting their act together and working on actually proving the invulnerability of their implementation to various attacks19:59
az0res/Ithey/they/19:59
az0reLattice instead gets really scared they don't have a secure product, so they take legal means to deter people from looking20:00
thardinimagine if the engineers at xilinx, lattice etc had a say instead of the bean counters20:01
az0reI mean... if you're right daveshah, and you quite possibly are, Lattice is just a joke of a company20:01
daveshahIt's a total guess. But if this isn't just a legal team gone rampant (and it seems too technically specific) then there will  be a reason20:02
az0reBTW looks like relevant stakeholders at LatticeSemi are Esam Elashmawi (Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer), Byron Milstead (General Counsel), and Mark Nelson (VP of Worldwide Sales).20:03
thardinstakeholders should only means those who stake vampires, not those who are20:07
az0reMight be worth shooting them an email: "Are you sure you want to declare war on the open source community just because you're scared of how shitty your products might be?"  Make sure to include legally-not-a-threat threats about licensing changes, removal of support from Yosys/nextpnr and revenue impacts it will have, and looking for security flaws and selling them on black market, patent infringement and giving evidence to competitors, etc.20:07
az0reProbably won't change their minds if they all decided on this, but if some of them haven't heard of this decision and weren't involved, it wil lraise some red flags.20:08
somloaz0re: OTOH, maybe a "nice" letter inquiring about whether they're sure they want to alienate the FOSS market (which preferred them *because* of their insightful and friendly attitude so far)20:08
thardinmight want to be more diplomatic at first20:08
thardinwhat somlo said20:09
az0reI mean, sure, if you want to waste time.  But there's no need for pleasantries.20:09
az0reThis is a business decision.20:09
thardinsomething like "don't damage the goodwill you've accrued"20:09
az0reCut to the chase.20:09
somloaz0re: this said it more eloquently than I could, have a look :) https://lwn.net/Articles/81761920:09
tpbTitle: An uproar over the Fedora Git forge decision [LWN.net] (at lwn.net)20:09
somloit's "multiple personality" and "distributed decision making" :)20:10
az0reYep that's a great comment20:11
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az0reI did not mean to anthropomorphize LatticeSemi with "you".  I should have written "y'all" and "y'all're".20:14
somloI wasn't trying to imply you're even antropomorphizing them :) It's just that I'm (maybe naively) hoping this is an example of where someone in charge can step in and say "You done screwed up, now go fix it" :)20:15
daveshahfwiw https://twitter.com/ico_TC/status/126858347231626445120:16
az0reYep, exactly, that's what I'm thinking20:17
az0reHopefully there's someone--maybe CC the CEO, too--who can think for 5 seconds and put a stop to this idiocy20:17
* sorear is unconvinced people who care about OSS make up more than 0.1% ($100K this quarter) of Lattice's revenue20:21
sorearif you can convince lattice they have any reason to care, maybe you can also convince me?20:21
thardinhow many people use lattice's tools?20:22
daveshahthe main reason for them to care is brand recognition20:23
daveshahxilinx and intel spend loads on free dev boards and material for unis20:23
thardinare any of these tools scriptable in a normal terminal? that is, Makefile-compatible?20:25
thardinyou could make a CI argument20:25
daveshahyes, although that can be done easily enough with the Lattice tools20:25
daveshahthe main problem with the Lattice tools and CI is the MAC locking20:26
thardineven on debian?20:26
daveshahfor private CI that tends to work though20:26
thardinah. that sounds annoying20:26
daveshahProbably20:26
thardinnot that MAC addresses are unique20:26
daveshahor hard to change20:26
daveshahbut you wouldn't steal a car; you wouldn't steal a gratis software license20:27
somloLattice's *other* problem with uni ECE curricula (besides licensing and overall clunkiness of the toolchain) is the lack of a decently equipped dev board20:27
bwidawskI thought customers of the fpga vendors would want to be able to debug their own issues, optimize their own flows, and have mobility between hardware...20:29
bwidawskthat turned out to not be as true as I thought20:30
thardinstockholm syndrome or something20:30
somlothe want those things, they're just too far zoomed in to know it :)20:30
bwidawskwhat I ran into was the shops get engineers who are good at *A* toolchain20:31
bwidawskthe cost of changing is too high20:31
bwidawskso yeah, somlo, too zoomed in20:31
bwidawskdaveshah: sorry this was your plight20:32
daveshahoh don't worry, luckily there are other fish in the sea20:32
daveshahlattice's new parts were pretty overpriced anyway20:33
thardinwoop, seems a HX1K is sufficient for the project I'm working on20:39
thardin52% utilization for the most important parts of the design20:39
thardin67 MHz even20:40
Loftydaveshah: so what now? Xilinx?21:11
LoftyAnd hope for a Lattice retraction?21:11
daveshahBasically, yes21:13
LoftyAnd presumably prjoxide is on hold?21:15
LoftyThough the only part it targeted was CrossLink, right?21:16
daveshahThat was for the CrossLink NX21:18
daveshahIt will indeed be on hold21:18
daveshahI was hoping to continue it for the new iCE parts whenever they are released21:18
daveshahBut the tools for those will almost certainly be under this new license21:18
LoftyWe'll see, I suppose21:22
sorearand even if OSS was a driving factor, they can't count on exclusivity for any length of time21:25
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awyglethe security thing makes a fair amount of sense tbh22:27
awygle(not like, technically, but if they were _only_ going to include that clause on _some_ parts, it'd be the security ones)22:27
awyglei will hold out hope that when the ECP6 comes out there's no such issue22:28
awyglei really don't want to use xilinx parts :(22:28
whitequarkdaveshah: so this actually makes me more likely to spend time REing those parts22:30
whitequarkand, naturally, openly release cracks for Diamond as a punitive measure22:30
whitequarkor whatever is the new tool22:30
daveshahRadiant22:31
daveshahThis new thing is Propel, which ironically is little more than a bundle of open source software tooling22:31
whitequarkah right22:31
daveshahAs far as I know the new parts will still use Radiant in general, Propel is just their IP integrator and SDK22:32
az0rewhitequark: +122:32
daveshahBut I suspect Radiant will use this new license for future versions too22:32
az0reI'll help if I can22:32
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az0renetsplit?22:37
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az0reirccloud disconnected or something?22:37
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awyglei get the impulse but that feels like a step 3 or 4 to me? would personally like to give them a chance to retract or explain their idiocy.22:40
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daveshahWe shall see22:41
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daveshahA few people have contacted them now22:41
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awyglethe messaging of "you were supportive then you stopped, so now we'll punish you, even though we haven't punished people who were never supportive" seems a bit iffy to me. but my opinion is moot since realistically i'm not gonna do either of those things myself anyway22:43
whitequarkawygle: I have, actually22:44
whitequarkeven got a C&D for it22:44
whitequarkanyway, yes, they will get some time22:44
awygleoh, well then22:44
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whitequarkawygle: I guess the bottom line is that this feels like betrayal, and is harder to tolerate than the approach of someone like Xilinx who has always been openly hostile22:49
LoftyAs I posted, it's a trust thing to me at least22:49
daveshahTo be fair even Xilinx seem to be moving in the right direction at the moment22:49
LoftyIf this gets past without even advanced notice, what stops it from happening again?22:49
daveshahWhich makes Lattice behaving like this even more shocking22:49
awyglewhitequark: yeah, i can understand that. i come down a different way, like i said, but that take certainly makes sense.22:50
LoftyMeanwhile at intel: *crickets*22:50
whitequarkawygle: I'm going to tone it down to "let's see what happens and keep that option in mind as something we can do if they prove their hostility after all and this turns out to not be a misunderstanding."22:50
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awygle:thumbs_up: (i've become an emoji-user... oh dear)22:51
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daddesioI'm late to the discussion, but I've heard chipmakers like working with students (giving samples), because when said students go on to engineering companies they tend to stick with the components they're already familiar with and use them in new designs. I would have never played around with Lattice if it weren't for symbiflow.23:12
daddesiolattice isn't tied to military or automotive, they appear in lots of general devices I think (the new siglent scopes for instance)23:22
az0reLattice would like to be used in military parts if they are not already (I think they are, but obviously not in the same applications as Xilinx devices)23:33
az0reIt's a big market23:33
az0reAnd don't forget CFIUS refusing a sale to the Chinese23:34
az0reThat cost me some money...23:34
az0rehttps://www.marketwatch.com/story/cfius-blocks-sale-of-lattice-semiconductor-to-canyon-bridge-fund-2017-09-13-16911918 (sorry for linking to MarketWatch trash)23:36
tpbTitle: CFIUS blocks sale of Lattice Semiconductor to Canyon Bridge Fund - MarketWatch (at www.marketwatch.com)23:36
az0re"The national security risk posed by the transaction relates to, among other things, the potential transfer of intellectual property to the foreign acquirer, the Chinese government's role in supporting this transaction, the importance of semiconductor supply chain integrity to the U.S. government, and the use of Lattice products by the U.S. government"23:36
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