gamesfairy ([info]gamesfairy) wrote,
@ 2008-11-26 04:10:00
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Entry tags:fpga, fyp, university, vr

So, a glimmer of progress in the saga that is my final year project!


ltsp:~# hexdump -C /sys/bus/pci/drivers/Crypto_driver/0000\:02\:00.0/key
00000000 00 00 31 00 00 00 00 00 64 00 33 00 00 69 00 79 |..1.....d.3..i.y|
00000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
00000020
ltsp:~# echo 0123456789abcdef > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/Crypto_driver/0000\:02\:00.0/buffer
ltsp:~# hexdump -C /sys/bus/pci/drivers/Crypto_driver/0000\:02\:00.0/buffer
00000000 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 61 62 63 64 65 66 |0123456789abcdef|
00000010 0a 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f |................|
00000020 20 21 22 23 24 | !"#$|
00000025
ltsp:~# echo ENCRYPT > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/Crypto_driver/0000\:02\:00.0/command
ltsp:~# hexdump -C /sys/bus/pci/drivers/Crypto_driver/0000\:02\:00.0/buffer
00000000 30 31 03 33 34 35 36 37 5c 39 52 62 63 0d 65 1f |01.34567\9Rbc.e.|
00000010 0a 11 23 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f |..#.............|
00000020 20 21 22 23 24 | !"#$|
00000025
ltsp:~#


It works, with a 'testing' XOR core. The bottom dump is the key xor the second dump. Yay! That's running in FPGA via pcie.
The project is, looking at my original Gantt chart, around three weeks behind schedule, mainly because I had a bit of a nightmare (well, a lot of a nightmare) grappling with the Xilinx PCI-Express core. Once I got it running - about a week ago - everything else was fairly straightforward. I'm hoping I can make up for lost time over Christmas (which should be do-able, because I built so much 'spare time' in to my schedule, anticipating this kind of catastrophe) and get everything done on time.

Also troubling me is that all my Uni stuff this semester is due on the same day, and there's some impressive juggling going on between my VR group project (to model a chunk of the Univeristy in Second Life) and another module, in which I am required to model some stuff in a formal Finite-State language.

Most of the VR stuff is done now. My part of the project is to interface the 3D environment to the Uni's web-based 'learning environment', Blackboard. Blackboard, however, doesn't kick out any nice webservices, so there's a lot of screen-scraping and generally horrible code going on in there. All of that's now done, though, so I just need to finish it off by writing some scripts in Second Life to make everything feel immersive. Watch this space.




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[info]the_stony_1
2008-11-26 07:27 am UTC (link)
Blackboard is a steaming pile of arse, I totally don't envy you.

But yay for working stuff :D Is it 'just' an FPGA on PCIe, then?

(Reply to this) (Thread)


[info]gamesfairy
2008-11-26 03:08 pm UTC (link)
Truth. Apparently the newer version of BB has some nice XML datafeeds, but not the old version the Uni run.. :/

And yeah, it's 'just' that. At the moment there's a 2kbyte 'data' buffer in the FPGA which it all works on.. if I get time I'd like to up that, and there's 8mbyte of DDR DRAM on the board, so it'd be nice if I get enough time to use that.. :D

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)


[info]the_stony_1
2008-11-26 08:08 pm UTC (link)
I'm lead to understand DRAM controllers are a world of pain but all power to you if you manage it. What FPGA is it? A lot of the newer ones have instantiable memory blocks (especially the Altera ones) so you can just declare a bunch of fast RAM and it appears, genius.

Worth stealing some ideas off this guy? He wins some major cool points.

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