Remote #ci is the way to go in #modernhw digital design testing. In this #ciseries, let’s see how to implement it with detail using sourcehut and a real world example.

Remote #ci is the way to go in #modernhw digital design testing. In this #ciseries, let’s see it in practice with some detail using two of the most popular forges out there.

How to seek, detect, be notified, analyze logs, understand and react to the different possible kind of issues one may encounter in a digital design is a vast topic of research, well beyond the scope of this modest post. But there are a couple of things we may state about here, though: automatizing issue detection is the way to go. Continuous integration (#ci) testing is a practice to adopt in #modernhw as a way to ensure that our design complies with its constraints. Let’s see this in more detail.

Guix reveals as a practical means of handling dependencies. However, the amount of information available to start using it may appear as a bit overwhelming for a beginner, letting the feeling of a tool reserved to a reduced community or experts. Far from that. Here you’ll find everything you need to get started with guix, with a light touch on using it for #modernhw.

As one understands with time and a bit of experience, keeping track of the whole bunch of #dependencies necessary to handle daily when doing digital hardware design may reveal as an error-prone task. And yet, this is not to speak about regressions, incompatibilities and most important, #reproducibility of results. Luckyly enough, this is precisely the problem that #guix intends to solve, in an elegant, minimalistic and open way, using only #freesoftware.