I write posts and try to do them daily or at least weekly. Check out my site (tristanxr.com/) for my latest posts. I often write about topics like ARM, RISC-V, NixOS, and things I am interested in or involved in.

I can't look at Twitter, it's all cyber security issues... Can we please have no vulnerabilities for the next like 48 hours?

Most problems I deal with during RTL dev is timing. Literally most issues is just timing being too marginal and things failing due to that.

How do people make sure UEFI GOP option ROM's work without real hardware?

Because of the number 4 and file uploads in PHP, a lot of the Internet is quite vulnerable. These next few days are going to be crazy. Especially now that you can just tell a clanker to do a thing and with a reasonable degree of success, it'll just do it. With how many vulnerabilities there are, it's becoming more trivial for bad actors to act malicious.

Boing ball on Glacier

Got an Artix 7 board from Alinx, PCIe is like 80% working in a test bitstream with openXC7. Hoping to get Glacier to be usable under Linux with this.

GLM-5.3 is good at removing Claudisms

Claude added a dedicates port from an SDRAM controller to the scanout module. It then wonders why PnR is becoming difficult to solve. I tell it its because of that long bus between the SDRAM to the scanout. It pushes back but checks, it realizes I am right. I tell it to go from wishbone to AXI4 and use the different channels to help with access. It does that and timing increases beyond the pre-second SDRAM read port. LLM's need to be trained more on hardware design, they don't understand timing. I do think it's somewhat because they don't imagine things. I definitely visualize the congestion and can rationally think about it. But at least Claude wants to be evidence driven and doesn't believe things unless it checks. But it wants to check absolutely everything.

Glacier is properly running a starfield animation.

It's funny when Claude uses flip flops for buffering instead of BRAM and wonders why routing struggles.

Claude: This change is adds an extra 270 cycles of latency. *Runs PnR, Fmax up by 40%* Claude: I was wrong, this is faster.

I might get a Kintex 7 FPGA, it looks like openXC7 has done a decent job getting those supported.

Why is PayPal closing my account that I use actively and have logged into over the past 3 years? I literally last used it just a few hours ago. I've had this account for years.

Glacier is coming online. I can only issue 1 command to the GPU until it dies. However, progress is being made. Once things are fixed, going to try rendering a test pattern.

Putting a RISC-V GPU onto the ULX3S at NixCamp.

Chock now has a comparison with Claude Code and Codex. chock.ws/comparison/