Microwatt grows up
summary
Microwatt is an open POWER core that now boots Linux on an Arty A7 and runs at about 100 MHz with 256 MB RAM; development uses GHDL, yosys/nextpnr for ECP5 and GitHub Actions for CI. It adds an implements Radix MMU that walks arbitrary Radix layouts, L1 TLBs, a 32 KB 4‑way L2 cache, a simple XICS interrupt controller, and a soft FPU that fits ~4,500 LUTs and does IEEE rounding; kernel + device tree patches are available and the system demonstrably works.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 7:09Power ISA basics
- 10:59Power ISA versions
- 14:45Linux requirements
- 17:56Interrupts
- 20:03Privilege modes
- 28:45Memory management unit - implementation
- 31:26More memory!
- 32:46Floating-point unit
- 35:04FPU - Data paths (Simplified)
- 37:00Hardware Random Number Generator
- 38:57Linux kernel hacks
- 39:55What can we use it for?
- 43:21Thank you!
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