Antmicro introduced Renodepedia, an extensive database of contemporary hardware powered by Renode, the open source simulation framework, using Zephyr as one of the key data sources, in a webinar on November 3. Renodepedia is a follow-on effort to the Renode Zephyr Dashboard – a massive Continuous Integration system that covers testing of more than 50% of all Zephyr build targets against several test cases.
If you missed the webinar, the video and presentation materials are now available to view and download.
In this video, you’ll learn how to uncover data that is often obscured from engineers and how Zephyr’s structure yields practical benefits – and listen about our journey from being able to run a dozen or so cases, to over a thousand green ticks in our dashboard, and then to organizing this data further into a navigable, testable and verifiable portal that can help future developers understand the broad landscape of available hardware platforms.
We will show you how to process device trees hosted by Zephyr using a new tool called dts2repl, from which we automatically generate simulation scenarios for Renode which we then execute with a passing result on over 200 targets.
With data gathered from Zephyr, dts2repl, Renode and the Zephyr Dashboard we are able to construct a new source of knowledge – Renodepedia, which presents this data in a coherent and interlinked way, allowing you to navigate the complex ecosystem and helping answer questions every project faces: “which platform will work for me?”, “what if my SoC becomes unavailable?”, “how to migrate to a different hardware platform without rewriting my entire software stack?” (spoiler alert: use Zephyr and Renode).
Presentation materials can be found below.
Driving open hardware with software
The future of Renodepedia is very exciting – several developments are already in the works to add more useful data, features and an even better user experience. On the hardware side, Antmicro is building up an open PCB component database and an automatic rendering flow which will allow generating photorealistic images straight from KiCad which ultimately could be used to create interactive and animated board models. Antmicro’s work within RISC-V and CHIPS Alliance is the driving force behind the efforts to make the vision of open source SoCs composed of open source blocks a reality – and with its open and interconnected nature, Renodepedia lays the foundation for this future. If you’re interested in using Renode in your project or would like to have your platform supported in our simulation framework and included in Renodepedia, reach out to us at support@renode.io. Learn more in this blog.
