So our speaker is Aaron Thomas, and he will talk to us about risk-v. Aaron, you have the floor. Is the mic on? Yep, okay, good. Alright, so I'm Aaron Thomas, and I'll be talking about Risk 5, open hardware for your open-source software. So how many of you have heard of Risk 5? That's a good number. How many of you were aware that Risk 5 is actually pronounced Risk 5 and not Risk V? That's actually pretty good. Okay, alright. How many of you have played with Risk 5 hardware either or emulated hardware at all? That's a few people. And how many of you have read any of the Risk 5 specifications? That's a good number. Okay, so there's people who know things about Risk 5 in the audience, so that's cool. So I'll give you a quick overview of my talk. I'll give you kind of a... The goal is sort of to give you a tour of the Risk 5 ISA, the instruction set, where it came from, kind of a quick overview and point you to the specifications, and then I'll talk about the ecosystem, so the hardware and software, the open-source hardware and software, that are available for Risk 5. And my kind of ulterior motive in coming here is to kind of grow the Risk 5 community, so I'm hoping I can get you all interested in Risk 5 contributing to Risk 5 and becoming a part of the community. So the talk, I'll start off with a little bit of a Risk 5 101, so a little bit of background on the ISA where it came from, that kind of thing. Then I'll talk about the Risk 5 hardware landscape. There's been a lot of kind of interesting developments in the Risk 5 hardware landscape. We actually have Risk 5 silicon that anyone can buy now, which is pretty exciting. And then there's a lot of open-source SOCs and chips that are out there. Then there's been a lot of work in the software stack in the last 6-12 months. A lot of open-source projects have been ported to Risk 5 and things have been upstream. Thanks. So yeah, so that's sort of the overview for the talk. Sure. I will do that now. Sorry. Is that better? Is that okay? Yeah. Alright. Okay. Is that okay? So that's the overview of the talk. A little background and then talk about the hardware and software ecosystem. So we'll start off with a little Risk 5 101. So Risk 5 is an open instruction set specification. It's an ISA. So some of the other ISAs that you may be familiar with, they're X86, ARM, Power, Alpha, MIPS. So Risk 5, unlike them, is actually an open specification. So you can build open-source or proprietary Risk 5 implementations. It's completely up to you. It's an open standard and you can do what you want with it. So if you tried to do this with one of the commercial ISAs such as ARM or X86, you might get a friendly letter from one of their lawyers. Maybe not so friendly. But yeah. So the nice thing about Risk 5 being an open ISA is that you don't have to pay any licensing fees. You don't have to deal with any lengthy contract negotiations and you don't have to deal with lawyers, which I think is a good thing as an engineer.  So I mean, if you're trying to build a really low-cost IoT device, the licensing fees can add up to a substantial cost for your specific device. Contract negotiations can be lengthy. It can take 6 to 12 months to come to a negotiation with ARM and other vendors.  Yeah, no lawyers, so that's good. So I'll give you kind of a quick overview of Risk 5. So Risk 5 has a very modest goal. And that goal is to become the standard ISA for all computing devices. So from microcontrollers to supercomputers, accelerators, basically any chip that you have in your iPhone system on chip, we want that to go from some sort of proprietary ISA, there's so many different proprietary ISAs to a single standard ISA and that would be Risk 5. And so, yeah, it's a modest goal. And so Risk 5 is designed for research, education, and commercial use. And our research and education were kind of the initial uses because this Risk 5 actually came from the University of California, Berkeley. They were using it for research and education. And it's also becoming more widely used in the commercial sector. People are building products on Risk 5. And if you go to the Risk 5 workshops, it's kind of interesting. So I've been to all of the Risk 5 workshops and every workshop, there's more people using Risk 5, there's more companies using Risk 5. There's a lot of interesting research people are doing with security extensions and memory models and silicon photonics. So there's a lot of interesting Risk 5 stuff that's been happening because there's an open standard. So you can blame these folks for Risk 5. These are the responsible parties. So Krista Sanovich and David Patterson are professors at the University of California, Berkeley. David Patterson actually retired recently, so I guess he's a professor emeritus. And there's students Andrew Waterman and Yonsep Lee are sort of the inventors of Risk 5. And so the story goes that Krista and the Berkeley Architecture Group, they were beginning to search for a common ISA for their research. So the way Berkeley works, or at least the Berkeley Architecture Research Group, is every five years they form a new lab to tackle some new problem. And so they were starting up this new lab and they had used a bunch of different ISAs over the years. And they were like, maybe we should start reevaluating what ISA we want to use for this specific lab for the next five years or so. And so the dominant ISAs that are out there right now are X86 and ARM.  So one is that they're fairly complex ISAs. There's a lot of instructions. If you've actually tried reading the Intel manuals or the ARM manuals, they're pretty long. There's a lot of stuff in there. If you ever see Krista Sanovich on the street, you should ask him about X86's AAA instruction and see what reaction you get. So the ISAs are just generally too complex for research. So they decided against it. And then you have the IP issues. They're not open ISAs. If you try to tape out an ARM ship, you're going to get sued. So it's not really ideal for researchers. So then they embarked on... So as a result, they embarked on a three-month project with their own clean slate ISA in summer 2010. And they continued to work on it over the years and kind of refining the ISAs. They taped up more ships and gained more experience. And then four years later, three months turned into four years, they released the frozen RISC-5 user specification, May 2014. And then as people became in companies, academia and various people became more interested in RISC-5. RISC-5 sort of moved outside of Berkeley and became part of the RISC-5 foundation. And the foundation was formed in August 2015 to kind of care-take the ISA. On a personal note, I actually designed an ISA myself. I embarked on my own three-month project. I co-designed an ISA for an undergraduate computer architecture course. And it was not a particularly great ISA. If RISC-5 existed, then I would have used it. So yeah, I think RISC-5 will be a good thing for researchers and university lecturers everywhere. So the RISC-5 foundation, which was recently founded, it's a non-profit. Its mission is to standardize, protect and promote the free and open RISC-5 instructions that are architecture and also to help build up the hardware and software ecosystem for use in all computing devices. And so the RISC-5 foundation is a non-profit based in the U.S. and it has over 50 members and there's a lot more members that have been joining or are interested in joining. So we expect that to continue to grow. And there's been broad commercial and academic interest. So the last RISC-5 workshop, the fifth workshop, sold out. We had over 350 people and the attendance has been steadily going up. And so that pulled from 107 companies and 29 universities. So it's sort of a broad interest in RISC-5. So some members of the RISC-5 foundation. So you have some fairly large companies. So Berkeley, of course, is a member of RISC-5 foundation. But big companies such as Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox, Micron, MicroSemi, Microsoft, NVIDIA, NXP, Qualcomm, Sci-Fi of Western Digital. You get the picture. There's a lot of big companies that are interested in RISC-5 and kind of evaluating RISC-5 for their products and research. Other RISC-5 members, AMD, ETH Zurich, MIT, Low Risk. There's a lot of people who are interested in who are members of the RISC-5 foundation. And actually these slides are out of date a little bit. There's been a few people have been added. So the RISC-5 foundation is doing pretty well. So to go back to the RISC-5 ISA. So RISC-5 is the fifth risk ISA from Berkeley. So the earlier risk research was done at Berkeley in Stanford in the 80s. And so they've done a number of risk chips over the years. So this is the fifth risk ISA from Berkeley. So it's RISC-5, so the Roman numeral 5 or V. And the nice thing about RISC-5 is the modular ISA. So it has a simple base instruction set. It's fairly small. And then you can layer extensions on top of it. So it has this base plus extension model. And so there are 32-bit, 64-bit, and 128-bit versions of the ISA. And yes, I did say 128-bit, it turns out. So the ISA itself is the base ISA is fairly small. There are fewer than 50 hardware instructions in the base ISA. So this makes it feasible to implement microcontrollers and really small cores. And as I mentioned, it's designed for extension and customization. So you take a RISC-5 core, and you basically can customize it to your application. And this sort of comes from the base plus extension model. So to just kind of go over the base ISA. So there are different base integer ISAs for each word with. So the 32-bit RISC-5 instruction set, the kind of naming scheme is rv32i, and i stands for integer. 64-bit is named rv64i, and 128-bit is rv128i. So the way RISC-5, the kind of naming scheme is that they have these one-letter names for extensions. So i stands for integer, and there are a number of other standard extensions. So m stands for integer, multiply, divide, a stands for atomic memory operations, f is the single precision floating point extension, and d is the double precision floating point extension. And so because all of these extensions are fairly widely used and necessary to boot up in general purpose operating system, they're lumped into this GISA. So this includes the integers, your multiply, divide, atomic, single and double precision floating point. And this is the ISA that you'll use if you want to boot Linux or BSD or something like that. So in addition to the standard instruction sets you also have, you can build your own non-standard extensions as well. RISC-5 is designed for that. So kind of the cool thing about the RISC-5 ISA is that it's small enough that you can actually fit it on a sheet of paper. So this is a green card for the RISC-5 ISA. It's not actually green, it's called Back in the Day, or so David Patterson tells me. So the nice thing is that the base integer instruction set is, you can list all the instructions in one column, basically in the left column. You probably can't read them in the back, but the RISC-5 ISA looks kind of like a standard RISC instruction set. You've got loads, stores, shifts, arithmetic operations, logical operations, compares, branches, that sort of thing. So it's pretty familiar if you've done any hacking on any RISC ISA in the past. At the bottom you can see some of the instruction formats. They're designed to be efficient for hardware implementers. The rest of the sheet actually shows the optional compressed extensions. So they have some extension for better code density. And then the back of the sheet has some of the other standard extensions, your multiply, atomics, and floating point, all this stuff. So there's enough room to actually include the RISC-5 calling convention. So it's a pretty kind of lean ISA. So you can look at the specs for the details. I'm sure you couldn't read that, but the specs are online. So you can check out the user-level ISA specification, version 2.1, to find out the details of what the instructions look like, what do branches look like, that sort of thing, what do loads and stores look like, what kind of arithmetic operations are available. The privileged ISA specification is in version 1.9.1. So the privileged ISA is actually, this is kind of the interface that the OS and firmware uses. This is actually in development, so version 1.10 will be released soon. And if you want to look at these specification sources, if you want to look at the actual LaTeX sources for these specifications, you can actually find them on GitHub as well, because it's an open standard. So now that we talked about the ISA as a whole, we're going to talk about the RISC 5 hardware landscape, some of the open source SOCs and cores that are available. So there's a lot of RISC 5 cores and SOCs, and they're designed for many different use cases. So some of the main use cases are education, research, and commercial products. And we'll see some of the examples here. And so you have cores that are really designed for small, low-cost microcontrollers, and you also have like high-performance, like multi-core chips as well. There's more of this over time. RISC 5 is still fairly new, and you see a lot of cores popping up and a lot more people developing RISC 5 now than even a year ago. And these cores are written in a variety of hardware description languages, or HDLs. So the ones you've probably heard of are VHDL and Verilog, and so there are RISC 5 cores, many of them that are written in VHDL and Verilog. Some other languages that you may not have heard of are Chisel and Blue Spec System Verilog. And so these are newer HDLs that are a bit higher level and in some ways a bit more productive. So some of the Berkeley cores, the Berkeley cores are actually written in the Chisel hardware description language. So I'll quickly talk about UC Berkeley and Psy 5 and the relationship there, just because a lot of the cores that I'll be talking about originate at Berkeley and Psy 5. So the Berkeley Architecture Group, UCV's BAR group, created RISC 5, so this was Chris Desanovic and David Patterson's group, as they were developing RISC 5, they also developed a number of open-source cores and SSEs for research and teaching. And eventually the RISC 5, so the graduate students, Andrew Waterman, Yonsepli, like graduated and they wanted something to do, so they decided, hey, this RISC 5 thing's kind of cool, and so they decided to found a company called Psy 5 with Chris Desanovic, and they basically designed custom RISC 5 chips for customers, and they're building on their open-source cores to do that. So it's kind of cool that they're actually a company that's doing open-source stuff, and they continue to contribute back to the cores that they built at Berkeley. So some of the Berkeley hardware that's out there, so for the system on ship, there's the rocket ship, and it's a parameterized RISC 5 SoC generator. Because it's parameterized, you can tweak the number of knobs that you can tweak. You can tweak the cache hierarchy, the number of cores, the TLB size, whether it's a floating point unit, whether it isn't, and it makes it really easy. You basically go in a config file and you can tweak the core to your needs. In addition to the system on ship, there are a number of cores you can choose from. So the rocket core is kind of the standard core that many people use. It's a five-stage pipeline, single issue. There's also BOOM, which is an out-of-order core. It's a research project by Chris Ceeley at Berkeley, and it's actually pretty cool to study the source code of an out-of-order core. There aren't that many out there for people to study. Berkeley also has a set of educational cores called SOTR. They're one-stage all the way to five-stage, and they're designed for simplicity so people can understand them in university courses. And you can find all the code on GitHub, which is pretty cool. So quick note about the rocket ship SoC generator. So as I mentioned, it's a parameterized... It's a parameterized SoC generator, and it's written in this chisel HDL. And so chisel is this new hardware description language from Berkeley that's an embedded Scala DSL. And so Berkeley uses it, and SciFi uses it for all of their cores. And so by using the rocket generator and chisel, you're able to target a few different backends. So you can target a C++ software simulator, which is basically an executable that simulates your risk five core. You can target an FPGA by targeting the FPGA tools, for instance, your Xilinx tools. Or you can target some of the ASIC tools, like Synopsys or Cadence. And so the nice thing about the rocket ship SoC generator is because it's parameterized, it's designed for customization, you can use this as a basis for your SoC. It's all open source, and you can use it for your application. So as I mentioned, you can either target FPGAs or actual real hardware. And so SciFi has been doing this, and they've been building on the rocket core and the rocket ship SoC generator. So they have two platforms now, the Freedom Everywhere, which is their low-cost 32-bit microcontroller product. And they have the Freedom Unleashed, which is the high-performance 64-bit multi-core SoC. This is kind of the Freedom Everywhere will run your kind of like real-time embedded operating systems, and the Freedom Unleashed will run Linux, BSD, that sort of thing. And you can find their code on GitHub as well. And so here's the cool hardware. So SciFi has these FPGA development kits. And so the RD board, which is about 100 on the left, is about $100 US, and you can use that to emulate the Freedom Everywhere. It's in the microcontroller class, and there's a little display hooked up on the right. It's Xilinx VC-707, and it's emulating the Freedom Unleashed. So this is the general-purpose core that runs Linux. And so the cool thing that you can probably see is that they're running DOOM, and they actually did this demo at the last RISC-5 workshop. And so it's kind of cool that you can run DOOM on a RISC-5 hardware. It was kind of a pretty cool demo. So RISC-5's kind of making progress. So FPGAs are cool. I really like FPGAs, and even more exciting is that there's actually RISC-5 Silicon now. So the Hi-5 One board is the first generally available open-source RISC-5 Silicon. There were people who had RISC-5 Silicon, but basically they fabricated themselves, so you either had to basically fabricate your own RISC-5 chip or have a borrow one from a friend, but now you can just go on Crowd Supply and buy one for yourself. So the Hi-5 One has the Freedom Everywhere 310 SoC. So this is the microcontroller core. It's Arduino compatible, and it supports the Arduino IDE, and it's about $59 U.S. from Crowd Supply. And a Hi-5 was kind enough to donate three boards, so I will be giving three boards away at the end of the talk for people to play with and hopefully port some more open-source software and just do that kind of thing. So the chip and the Freedom Everywhere 310, the chip in the Hi-5 One is open-source. So all the RTL source code, FPGA strips, board support packages are all on GitHub, and you can find the documentation board schematics there as well. So that's actually pretty cool. Another interesting project, another interesting RISC-5 SoC is a low-risk project. And some of you may have seen the talk two years ago here at FOSDEM that Alex Bradbury gave about low-risk. So low-risk is based at the University of Cambridge, and they're aiming to build a really low-cost development board. The tagline is Raspberry Pi for grown-ups. And it's... So it was actually founded by one of the founders of Raspberry Pi, so they basically want to create a completely open version of the Raspberry Pi, so that's actually, I think, pretty cool. And it also builds on the Rocket Ship SSC generator from Berkeley in Hi-5. And they're doing some interesting research things with tagged architectures for security and a minion cores for IO offload. And they have a couple tech notes about this, and I think they're doing some pretty cool stuff. And yeah, you should definitely check out Alex Bradbury at FOSDEM 2015 talk and just follow their progress in general because they're doing interesting things. And their code is also available on GitHub. So the shockty cores from IAT Madras are another set of RISC-5 SoCs. So RISC-5, apparently, is the standard ISA for India, which is kind of cool. And so as a result, IAT is building six open-source cores, and they're, like, literally going from microcontrollers to supercomputers. And so there's a lot of people building a lot of RISC-5 hardware there, which is pretty cool. And they're using BlueSpec System Verilog as their HDL of choice. And you can find their code on Bitbucket, not GitHub. And so some other RISC-5 SoCs and cores that are available. There's Pulpino from the ETH Zurich. There's PicoRV32 from Cliff Wolf, and this is meant to be a really size-optimized RISC-5 implantation, 32-bit RISC-5 implantation.  It seems like there's a new RISC-5 core popping up every day. I mean, there's a lot of people who are just kind of trying to build their own RISC-5 core, which I think is pretty cool because RISC-5 is an open standard. If you're a hacker, you can just go and build your own core, which is, I think, pretty cool. So if you want to customize RISC-5, I mean, the nice thing about RISC-5 is it's designed for customization. The easiest way to do it is to modify the tunable parameters of an existing core. So basically, you'll just grab the rocket ship and then play with some of the parameters, disable the floating point unit, mess with the cache hierarchy, et cetera. You can implement your own RISC-5 accelerator. You can implement your own RISC-5 instruction set extension. If you... Chapter 9 of the user specification has some information on this. And if you think it's useful enough for... If you think it might be useful to other people, you can submit it for standardization. And if you have a lot of time on your hands, you can implement your own RISC-5 core. So, yeah, there's been a lot of interesting stuff happening on the hardware landscape. So on the software landscape, in the last six to 12 months, there's been a lot of stuff happening as well. So just to kind of give you an idea of what development platforms are available. So if you don't actually have FPGAs and you don't have RISC-5 hardware, you can use a RISC-5 emulator. So Spike is kind of the standard RISC-5 simulator. So it's also called RISC-5 Isosim. It's kind of the golden model. So every time a specification update is released, the changes go into Spike. In addition to Spike, there's also QMU, which many of you are familiar with. So the QMU has RISC-5 support, but it's not upstream yet. We have support for full system and user emulation. So this is actually pretty cool. So there's another simulator called RISC-5 Emu, built by Fabrice Belard. And you can boot RISC-5 Linux in your browser, which is, I think, pretty cool. You should all go do that now and see if you can crash. Don't do that now, but it's pretty cool. So it was kind of funny. So Fabrice Belard is one of these guys who's super productive. So I get an email from him and he's just like, oh, yeah, so I built this small project. It's a RISC-5 emulator. It boots Linux in the browser. It has 128-bit support and some other stuff. Even Spike doesn't have 128-bit support. So he's like, I don't know. I didn't even know he's aware of RISC-5, so it was a pretty cool one. He was like, yeah, I got this little project. He does all these things. He's an impressive guy. So yeah, RISC-5 Emu is worth checking out. RISC-5, which is a full system simulator that's used by computer architecture researchers, and hopefully we can get that upstream and kind of farther along. So a quick note on Spike and QMU. So Spike is great for prototyping hardware features. I use it a fair amount. The nice thing about it is it has a really small and simple code base, and it makes it really easy to add instructions and customize the ISA and everything. But if you're doing software work, I think QMU is probably a better option. The emulation is faster. It's got a number of handy debugging features. It's got better device support. There are a few rough edges in QMU RISC-5 now, especially with respect to device support, but we'll be ironing it. We hope to iron them out fairly soon. So yeah, but both are good emulators. With respect to the RISC-5 tool chain, there's been a lot of progress. So I'm excited to report that RISC-5 support will be in Ben Util's 2.28, and the GCC Steering Committee has accepted the RISC-5 port for inclusion. So the port will likely make it into GCC 7.1. So this is due to a lot of hard work by Andrew Waterman and Palmer Dobbelt and thanks to all the GCC maintainers and reviewers for reviewing patches and making this happen. Now that we have the tool chain stuff, I think Linux distros and more of the software-enabled stuff will just fall out. The lack of an upstream tool chain really kind of was kind of slowing down some of the software efforts. So now that we have upstream tool chains, I think the software-enabled stuff will go a lot faster. In addition, there's an LVM port in progress. Some of the patches are upstream. Alex Bradbury from the Low Risk Project is working on this. There are a number of... He's working on co-gen patches. They should go out in the next week or two. His goal is to basically make this the cleanest back-end, and he wants the RISC-5 port to be the kind of exemplar for all the other architectures that come after it, so he's building a really clean port. And so as a result, it's taking a little bit longer, but I think it's going to be exciting when it's done. There's a lot of people who want to have LVM RISC-5. So we have a lot of RISC-5 OS and firmware ports in progress. They're all in various stages. Some are more mature, some are fairly early. So in terms of firmware, the kind of standard firmware right now is there's this Berkeley bootloader, which is kind of an initial firmware, but people are working on core boot and UEFI support, so that's coming online. For Linux, there are ports in progress for Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, and Yachto Poke. So Fedora has about 2,000 packages building. It's a little out of date. Debian has a little over 1,000 packages. Manuel's in the audience somewhere. You can talk to him about Debian. Yeah, so if you want to talk more about Debian RISC-5, you should talk to him, because it'd be great to get more people working on that. There's a Gentoo port. It's a little out of date, but Polymer will update it as soon as the stuff goes upstream. The Poke distribution, which is an embedded distribution, has been updated recently, and it's actually a reasonable platform if you want to do RISC-5 hacking. It's not upstream yet. We'll have to start pushing that stuff upstream as well. If you're a BSD person, FreeBSD actually has pretty good support for RISC-5. There's a couple things that need to be added, but FreeBSD actually has upstream RISC-5 support, which is pretty cool. NetBSD has a port in progress, and there are a number of other operating systems that have RISC-5 ports in progress, and these tend to be more embedded operating systems. So, SEL-4, Chinode, Hellenos, Zephyr, FreeRTOS, R10s, Minute. So the software stack is getting there kind of steadily. And the most exciting thing is that we have a couple operating systems that have upstream RISC-5 support. FreeBSD and FreeBSD 11.0 and the Zephyr kernel from the Linux Foundation also has upstream RISC-5 support. So that's actually pretty cool. The software stack is starting to come together. There are a number of RISC-5 language efforts in progress. For Java, there are people working on OpenJDK and JikesRVM. There's a Go port. There's a talk about Go at the last RISC-5 workshop. So there's a few Google people who are working on Go RISC-5, which is, they're making a lot of progress in a short amount of time. There's people working on OCaml and Haskell support for RISC-5. CompSert is a formally verified tool chain. It's also got RISC-5 support. There are people from Rust who are interested in getting RISC-5. It hasn't started yet, because they're kind of waiting on the LVM port. But I think once LVM comes in, we'll see a lot more language efforts kind of getting farther along. So there's a lot of action on the RISC-5 software front. So what's next? So we're preparing the Linux kernel, and we will be preparing the Linux kernel, GLib C, and QMU patches for upstreaming. So one of the things that's been kind of holding back some of the distros is the lack of upstream Linux kernel support in GLib C. So it looks like the Linux kernel support, the patches look reasonable. Some of the maintainers have looked at them. And there's a few issues that need to be fixed, but once they get fixed, hopefully those patches can go in. And then there's some work on GLib C as well. There's also some more work on standards. We need to flesh out our ABI specification. We also need to work more in the privileged specification, because it's not a frozen spec yet. It hasn't been ratified. So there's some more work to be done there, and this will be done sort of in parallel with the upstreaming of the Linux kernel and GLib C stuff. So as I was saying, once the Linux kernel and GLib C get upstreamed, we're going to continue... It'll make it a lot easier to do Linux distros. So we'll continue to kind of improve and update our Linux distro support and upstream those changes. And if there are any distro people in the audience, we'd love your help with getting RISC-5 on your distro. And in general, we want to port more software packages to RISC-5. So if you're a maintainer of any software packages, we'd love to work with you to add RISC-5 support. And yeah, so in general, we want to push RISC-5 forward. We hope you'll kind of join the RISC-5 community and kind of help kind of with some of these software tasks as well as some of the hardware stuff and documentation as well. So if you do want to get involved, there's some resources that you can check out. So all the codes on GitHub, so that's the GitHub organization. We have mailing lists for hardware development, software development, and development of the ISA. The RISC-5 workshop proceedings are online, so both the slides and the talks. And this is a good way to kind of get up to speed with what's been going on in the RISC-5 community. There's a stack overflow, so if you have questions about RISC-5, you can ask them here. Once you learn more about RISC-5, you can answer the questions. That would be great too. There are a couple articles in microprocessor report that sort of describe the RISC-5 ISA in general. If you're new to RISC-5, these are worth reading. So the first one kind of talks about the rationale for having an open ISA, and the second one talks a little bit more about RISC-5 particulars. There was an IEEE micro article written by the Berkeley folks about their agile approach to building hardware and RISC-5 microprocessors. And that's kind of interesting, because a lot of what they're doing is using open source and the Chisel HDL, a higher level HDL, to build hardware more quickly. So there are a number of upcoming RISC-5 events. If you're able to, it would be great if you could come to some of the events. Meet the community and get involved. So May 9th and 10th, there's the sixth RISC-5 workshop. It'll be in Shanghai, China. This is the first time the RISC-5 workshop has been outside of the U.S., so that's pretty exciting. It's hosted by NVIDIA, I forget the name of the universe, Shanghai.  And then March 14th to 16th, there's an embedded world. So a number of RISC-5 foundation companies will be exhibiting there. April 2nd to 3rd, G. Madras is having a RISC-5 conference. And so they've been doing a lot of work with RISC-5, so you'll hear more about their shock decors and you'll also hear about RISC-5 projects from all around the world. So that should be a cool event. September 8th through 10th, there's ORConf in Hebdenbridge, U.K. So ORConf is actually an open RISC conference, but they've kind of opened it up to RISC-5 people, so there'll be a fair number of RISC-5 talks there as well. So in summary, RISC-5 is an open instruction set specification. You can grab it, you can do it, you can build proprietary cores, you can build open-source cores. You don't have to worry about getting sued, which is good. But it's... And because it's an open instruction set specification, there's a lot of open-source cores that are available. So there's several options. I talked about the rocket ship, low risk. There are a number of other options that are available as well. I just highlighted a few of them. The RISC-5 software stack is steadily coming together. Things are getting upstream, distros are happening, and we love your help there. And in general, we're looking for contributors all across the hardware software stack. So the takeaway is that you should hack on RISC-5, and I hope to see you at one of the many 2017 RISC-5 events. Thank you. Sorry. Could you speak? Yeah, so this is one of these things that's sort of difficult. So I think the question was about what peripherals are available in the SoC and the bus. So Axi. Right, so this is a question about specific implementations. So for the rocket ship implementation, the bus that uses Axi, and they have, I don't know, they have spy devices, PWM, they have, I don't, I actually don't, they have some GPIOs. So this is one of these things where there are some devices, but there's going to be more work that needs to be done. And so I think the Free Chips Foundation, the Fawzi Foundation, LibreCores, I think together we'll have to work together. So there are some peripherals there in the SoC. I don't remember all of them offhand, but there definitely will need to be work there. There are no GPUs, for instance. That's difficult. But for a lot of the embedded peripherals, a lot of some of that stuff is there. I think we have USB now. Maybe, I don't know. So that's an implementation question. And so it depends on the implementation. So the ISA, I mean, it really depends on the implementation. So the Hi-Fi board can be clocked at 320 megahertz. They're using a TSMC 180 nanometer. The Freedom and Leash platform, they've quoted, they're going to use, TSMC 28 nanometer. You can clock that at 1.6 gigahertz above. 1.6 gigahertz and above is what they've quoted as. So it sort of depends on the implementation. Yeah. Actually, do you want a board? All right. Anybody else? You. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. So the next RISC-5 workshop that's outside, the first one that's outside the U.S. is going to be in China and sort of what about Europe, I think was the question. Yeah. So actually we were hoping to come to Europe. Just because of the timing. I mean, there were a couple venues that were discussed like Cambridge and Zurich, and it was mostly a timing thing. So we're definitely going to come to Europe. It was just the dates that we've set up were kind of difficult with university calendars and things like that. There will be some RISC-5 meetups that we haven't scheduled yet, but we're hoping to have a couple of RISC-5 meetups. There'll be smaller events in Europe. But yeah, we definitely want to have a foundation event soon in Europe. Probably, I assume, I think the next one will probably be in the U.S., but hopefully sometime next year we can get to Europe. But there are a lot of other, we'll definitely be holding smaller RISC-5 events. Sorry, what was that? I don't know about this year. So the question was will some of the RISC-5 founders come to ORConf? Yeah. So they've been to ORConf in the past, like two years ago they gave talks there. I don't know if it'll happen this year, but I'll see if they can make it, or some other RISC-5 people. Yeah, I think in general we should get more RISC-5 people going to ORConf events and come into Europe. You get aboard too. Does anybody else want to? Oh, yeah. The guy with the microphone. So now that you've tackled the CPU and thanks, how about pretty please with sugar on top start tackling the GPUs? Yeah. Please. Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah, so the GPUs are hard. There are some, I know there are some academic efforts that are building their own GPUs. But I think the RISC-5 foundation and some of the other, like, Fawzi Foundation, there's a new pre-chips project that's been founded and basically they're kind of taking over some of the, they're playing the foundation role for the rocket chip. So their goal is to build more open source IP blocks. I think the GPU is going to be hard. We need to get a lot more people working on that. So I think it's probably going to require collaboration between all the open hardware projects. There's a couple of academic projects that look promising. I don't remember, honestly. Yeah, I don't remember where they're from. Yeah, open GPU university. I'll ask some people about it because I remember hearing about a couple that seemed kind of promising. I mean, the other thing you could do is just post to the RISC-5 mailing list Hardware Dev and just get a discussion started. It's not a priority for us right now. There's a lot of other things we have to work on. The open hardware community as a whole together, we should definitely tackle that. Yeah, GPUs are hard. Open GPUs are hard, too. Yeah, we'll get you afterwards. Is there besides the instructions that you've shown here today, do you have any ideas about something like SIMD? SIMD, okay. So there's a vector extension that Krista's working on. So Krista's apparently worked on, like, vector machines. Kind of like his whole career. So he and some other old school vector people are really excited about putting, like, a vector proposal together. So there's been some discussion about it, but it's going to take a while to kind of standardize. If you're interested in that, you could talk to people on the ICDEV mailing list. We also have working groups at the RISC-5 foundation meetings. So there are people who are interested. In particular, it's all about vectors, so something will happen. I can't promise anything in terms of timeline. Yeah. Someone here had a question. Yeah. Oh, sorry. So you want to buy a sci-fi chip? Yeah, just a chip, not a board. Are they available for your own designs? I'm sure if you email sci-fi, they'll still use some chips. So you don't really know. Yeah. I mean, so their business model basically is that they'll do custom design for you. So I'm sure they'd be happy to sell you chips if you have some sort of board that you want to build or something. It's a pretty nice chip. About the openness, you mentioned a lot of times that it's open and there are no lawyers involved and there's nothing to be afraid just copy the implementation of the course and edit. What's the license? Are there any patent issues? Is there one license for all implementations? That's a good question. So the license depends on the implementation. So the Berkeley course under the BSD license, sci-fives licensing, some things under Apache, other people are using the ISC license. I'm sure there's some copy left like GPL hardware as well. So it's sort of up to the project to decide what license they want for their specific implementation. Yeah, absolutely. It can be proprietary as well. So if you're a company, and there are several companies doing this, because it's just a standard, you can implement your proprietary RISC-5 chip and that's completely fine. Yeah, is that everybody? Hi. What peripherals are available on the RISC-5 MCU that they're selling now? Yeah, okay, so... Like SPI, I2C.  I don't remember everything else. The crowd supply page will have all the details, but it's Arduino compatible, so you can put like Arduino shields in there. So there's a couple Adafruit shields that they use, and there are demos. So I don't remember all of the details, but if you go to the crowd supply website, it has all the details, and there's the data sheet. Yeah. Sorry, there's a question back there. So the question was, are there implementations using multi-threading? So there are multi-core implementations. Are you talking about like symmetric multi-threading, like hyperthreading? I'm talking about having maybe several program counters, several registered banks, and you can select which program counters every cycle. Find great multi-threading. Yeah, I don't know. They may exist, I'm actually not sure. I don't think the rocket ship does that. I think the rocket ship is just multi-core. So it doesn't have like hyperthreading or anything like that, or SMT. There were some questions back there. Okay. Okay, so the question was, are the specifications frozen, and what's the risk about if you buy hardware that it doesn't match the specification? So the nice thing about, so the specific, the high five one board only implements the microcontroller spec. So, or, it's a microcontroller, so it doesn't implement the privilege specification. So the stuff that it implements is frozen. But the privilege spec is under development. Hardware that is using the privilege spec. There actually isn't any generally available, but that could be a problem there. But we're hoping to standardize the privilege spec this year. So hopefully none of the hard, I think it's unlikely that hard roll will be out that doesn't match the spec. That's generally available. I mean, you can build your own test ship. Several people build test ships with the earlier version of the privilege spec. So two things. As you mentioned, GHC, the Haskell compiler, it's actually pretty easy to add basic architecture support to GHC. You just have to like edit two lines of Haskell code or something and like Autocon. I've actually been doing that in the past quite a lot for like Super H which is like now being redeveloped as an open source architecture. And the second thing in general is so in Devian developer and in Devian we have this project called Rebootstrap. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's basically like an automated system which allows you to cross bootstrap a new architecture. So it's like it's an amazing effort and you just run a simple script and in the end you end up with like the minimum set of packages cross-built for the new architecture that you need to be able to bootstrap meaning that you can build it on the build, the Devian built infrastructure. And the nice thing is that it's constantly running on a Jenkins job so we are like basically verifying all the time like if something you know is cross-boot strappable or not, packages cross-buildable and so with this mechanism we are actually fixing all the bugs and making new architectures built on Devian and we of course upstream build all that stuff. And open risk is included in that. That sounds cool. Manuel, I guess you know about it? Sorry? Sorry, it's not going to Manuel because he's done the Devian risk 5 port. I was like, Who? Manuel? No. Yeah, so he's our Devian guy. Can I get a board? Sorry. I think these two guys got one. If I have more, yes. There was a question there, yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a question about whether there's a certification program to make sure that the standard is followed. So that's actually something that the Risk 5 Foundation is working on. So it's kind of key that we're building out these compliance tests and so we need to make, and that's kind of like going to verify that you are meeting the Risk 5 standard. There's also been some work on building a formal specification of the Risk 5 ISA that's kind of different, but related. So that's in progress, but it's still pretty early.


e that I'm just curious as to in terms of family law and all that type of stuff and rights and access and stuff like does that mean that if two people get together and there's a blended family or whatever it might be what is the responsibility or relationship between the adults and the children and particularly the children of the other partner in that going forward and when does it cease but that's the whole question and that's why the lawyers for no group by the way are launching a very detailed document analyzing those precise issues I mean for instance if there's a single mother with a child or two children and a man moves in with her it does if she's regarded as a family under the new arrangement is there a second family or is it a different family when the man joins it and has a durable relationship of say two years with her if he has a further child with her and then goes off and forms a durable relationship with a third party or gets married to a third party is he what happens to the original family does it still exist none of these issues are in any way provided for in the well what happens now though what happens in that scenario you've just given what is the scenario now I mean he is with someone else it would be logical to say that whether it's legally or not that the first relationship is broken up he's taken up with another person and the first relationship then ceases and the the original family returns to the makeup of the moment of the child well I mean for instance at the moment people can cohabit and if you have a child by virtue of your cohabitation you may be liable provide maintenance for that child you may if you want to have such an arrangement agree with your cohabitant that you will or will not be liable to maintain the other party to the arrangement if it breaks up Senator is it not always the case though and my word never if we had a situation whereby one party in this call knows more than another but you know we put the legislation in it's not necessarily perfect it's always potentially going to be open to challenge and interpretation is this not why we have our courts and why we have the Eroctor so we have very clever and intelligent people in both to determine all of this through the process so in other words this recognizes that families are different now and people might say why recognize it we might return to more traditional families into the future let's not change the constitution but it does account for the fact that we are a changed society there's lots of different relationships out there it recognizes it and it is the job of the houses of the Eroctors and the courts now to make sense of this all for us and this is just the norm well I would agree with you that it's the job of the Eroctors to decide these matters but it isn't the job of the courts to make the fundamental law relating to cohabitation and to decide it in a series of caseload decisions and you know that's precisely why in the Shannot we put forward an amendment saying leave it to us to decide what is or is not a durable relationship and we can tweak that change it we can when court decisions come which we're unhappy with we can amend the law by simply passing a bill but what's happening here is that if the matter is given completely to the courts to decide and the Eroctors is given no function courts will hand down judgments and the only way to amend the law so to speak or to amend the outcome of those decisions will be to have a further referendum in relation to the there's a couple of issues in relation to the second referendum firstly in relation to the language why would it be that we have it phrased in such a way that there's not an actual commitment on the state we can try and I mean then that's open to real interpretation as to whether we try or not and then why is care why is care not more broad and why is it the focus of this part of the constitution only for care within families so in other words so the actual legislative care is in families and in supporting that the government is effectively seemingly saying into the future we'll try our best to support that but you know strides very open-ended well the term strife in fact is deliberately put in there as far as I can see Greg to ensure that nobody can go to court and say help me and get a court order saying you must help me in caring for another member of my family but the care amendment has two fundamental functions number one it takes out the existing article 41 2 of the constitution which obliges the state to support the decisions of women who want to work in the home rather than be forced by economic necessity to work outside the home and that has consequences that existing word in Greg was the basis of the Murphy tax decision and the Murphy tax decision was one where the Supreme Court said to the Iraqis you can't have income tax laws which discriminated unfairly against people who are married compared to people who are simply living together unmarried so that's going to be taken out by the government and it has consequences too because there are a number of court decisions invoking that precise wording to say that when couples break up the woman in the home who's parenting can't be obliged by her her former partner to work outside the home if he has the resources to keep the situation in existence whereby she can continue to parent within the home that's being taken out and those are valuable provisions instead of that they're bringing in a very vague minded strive to assist carers family carers but I mean not my colleague in the Charlotte Tom Clonan is a veteran disability campaigner and he's wholly opposed to this and he says you know there are many many carers who sorry there are many many people in need of care for instance people who need independent living supports by the by the state to which in respect of which the family is utterly irrelevant either the family is into a position to help them or they are not in a position to avail of family help and as as people get old particularly with disability and there are family carers for them for one reason or another this particular amendment is of absolutely no use at all it's being inserted Greg in the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution but it gives absolutely no enforceable rights to anybody at all okay but then it seems pretty useless so is it not then at least an advantage that people like myself who raise children on my own for a considerable amount of time that I'm recognised equally that I'm as important as a woman in the same position well the courts have said frequently that the reference to women in the home in the in the and their work in the home in the in the Constitution is not to be interpreted as saying that men don't have duties and rights in respect of the same kind they were they were saying that this was a special protection for women and it is a special protection for women because in even though I mean I don't know about your personal situation Greg but the vast majority of parenting is obligations are discharged to a to a larger degree by women oh for sure I don't I don't disagree with you in that just in relation to this like I sometimes we get on things words and phrases that I think is a bit of a distraction and I'm not sure what you've used your views are on a bit like I'm hearing an argument about you know a woman's places in the home it's not even in the in the Constitution but I mean that was just that was just effectively how some people perceived this part of the Constitution and then it became just normal familiar language I don't think anyone truly believed that a woman's place is in the home is in the Constitution do you think it's a distraction us arguing about that though Ministers keep using this phrase yes but it's kind of that this is to remove the language that women's places in the home yeah but we heard this long before the Constitution never said that as you just pointed out Greg and it's it's it's it's a lie effectively to keep repeating that and you know the so you actually believe that phrase is being weaponized in favor to favor yes yes okay all right that's fine it's weaponizing a lie and I mean if you look at the Constitution you'll find in article 45 that there is a recognition of all citizens men and women equally this is the phrase it uses to go out and earn their livelihoods and to provide for themselves in this way so the suggestion that the Constitution can find women to the home is just a complete untruth but did this part of the Constitution again correct me if I'm wrong was it not used to and there's many people listening to this who who you know they don't have a pension or very much reduced pension because of this this this this part of the Constitution no well the answer that is no and for instance people are saying now oh well you know the marriage bar reflected this part of the Constitution to people working in the public service that's another lie the marriage bar existed from the 1880s right through the creation of an independent dire state with its own Constitution in 1922 and 1937 up to 1973 it was this provision has nothing whatsoever to do with that it was a most unfair discrimination but it didn't it didn't arise in the Constitution and wasn't justified by the terms of the Constitution so finally we heard from from Sinn Fein that that's that they will put these to the people again even if it's a no I'm not sure what the government's position is in relation to this what is your position do you believe that these two parts of our Constitution do need to be looked at or if it's a no no would you prefer to say just leave it alone and you've made the arguments as to why yeah I think the best first of all if you don't know vote no but going ahead but you know because it's so complex Senator you know that really effectively saying including myself vote no because we're not going to all know that it's not such a thing I mean Sinn Fein said that that that they would re-amend this but I mean this the Constitution isn't isn't just you know a regulation or a statutory instrument or a statute this is serious stuff and if they don't agree with the wording they should say no and they should have they should have opposed it in the door and they should have come up with their own wording and they should have insisted on it and they should have voted against the guillotine motion they had all of these opportunities but they didn't take them and what we're faced up with faced with now is two amendments the Constitution which will do very serious damage one to the the by by by loosening the the the the definition of family to cover all sorts of situations which we don't know and which we'll decide in the future by the courts and secondly to take out article 41 2 of the Constitution which has been used to invalidate discriminatory income tax acts which has been used by the courts to ensure that women get a fair deal women in the home get a fair deal in in alimony and maintenance payments and we're being asked to take these out just simply to put in place the so-called care referendum article which in in fact gives no rights to anybody okay senator michael mcdull thank you very much for your time I do appreciate it all right take care of yourself that senator michael mcdull who is of course the former thonister minister for justice and attorney general he's advocating a no-no we've heard from people as well advocating a yes-yes and we're trying to mix up to the yes-no's and the no-yes is but as I say in the round we are giving all views so listen keep listening to the show we will have further debates where yes no we're on together at the same time but we've had an opportunity for a yes-yes on a couple of occasions to have their saying that's no-no there and and do you know what debates are fine but I think actually what I want to hear is you know conversations that are challenged like in relation to no-no but also in relation to yes-yes I think that's I think that's really helpful to have two people on at the same time arguing yes no yes no I'm not sure that I actually really in this show should be more of a fan of debates but I think debates are entertaining I'm often not sure how we're not showing away from debate by the way we'll have them they're they're entertaining but I'm not sure how informative they are right okay thanks to Senator McDowell there let us see taking a break now the county's number one talk show the nine till noon show on Highland radio choose life choose fun choose not sitting at home getting bored choose something better something really fun choose Fundamenia coming to the Brunswick movie bowl from March 1st choose regular junior or family wristbands and enjoy some of Europe's top thrill rides choose fun for all ages a legendary Fundamenia event first to the 17th of March for details see fundamenia.co.uk creative landscaping works are the Donegal distributors of millboard cladding and decking thanks to its unique polymer resin construction this decking and cladding doesn't deteriorate like natural wood and won't be beaten for durability it also has superb slip resistance even when wet and every board is produced using recycled materials live life outside with millboard at creative landscaping works listen in and letter kenny see creativelandscapingworks.com do you need a UK address save hundreds of euros on custom charges shopping online with spacehubdairy we provide a full virtual address mailbox service for all your business and personal use save hundreds possibly thousands on custom charges with spacehubdairy call<PHONE_NUMBER>7 or online spacehubdairy.com for more details this sleep day some things are absolutely guaranteed like boyfriends mysteriously going AWOL for the day and 84 year olds having 21st birthday parties but another guarantee this sleep day and only in Ireland is that one Eurodreams player will win 2,000 euro every month for the next five years that's 2,000 euro a month for five years guaranteed but only if you play Eurodreams on the 29th of February the national lottery it could be you play responsibly play for fun local enterprise week is back and 2024 is all about inspiring you to be brave when starting growing or scaling a business running from Monday the 4th to Friday the 8th of March local enterprise week is organised by local enterprise office Dunnegall in association with their enterprise partners during the week over 20 events are taking place across Dunnegall booking is essential to see the lineup of events and speakers and to book visit localenterprise.ie forward slash Dunnegall or call 9160735 choose life choose fun choose not sitting at home getting bored choose something better something really fun choose fundomania coming to the Brunswick movie bowl from March 1st choose regular junior or family wristbands and enjoy some of Europe's top thrill rides choose fun for all ages a legendary fundomania event first to the 17th of March for details see fundomania.co.uk aqueous payments land and farmers accounts for more in your Irish farmers journal here's paul mooney over 20,000 farmers to receive key farm payment this week hogget prices hit record high beef finishers losing close to 200 euros per head in autumn stores full reaction to EU nature restoration law milk price top up for a revos suppliers beef and cheap farmers lose out in trade deals plus we hear from three farmers devastated by tb outbreaks all inside the Irish farmers journal you cannot afford to miss it Nutrious XL Yo with lamb and Nutrious Yo with lamb crunch are formulated to ensure a vigorous lamb and excellent milk yield avail of our lambing season offer 25 kg bags by 10 get one free and 15 euro off per tonne in bulk available at your local homeland store visit nutrious.ie for full nutritional information I have exciting news to share at Mofford tails we have prices beyond compare tails as low as $13.99 a yard yes they're really cheap transform your space without making your wallet weep lamb on a floor no so niche starting from just $10.99 a yard sure we can't be beat if you need bathwear don't you fret with reduced prices you won't regret sure where would you get it Mofford tails and Mofford retail park we are open Monday to Friday 9 30 to 5 and Saturday 10 to 4 you can call us on 08 3 091 0707 Highland radio are celebrating another birthday we are inviting you to join us for our Highland radio birthday bash on Tuesday the 19th of March in the Mount Eregal Hotel joined by the one and only Margo myself David James plus special guests Brendan Quinn Declan Ernie and Patrick Feeney this is a night not to be missed tickets now on sale for more information visit the outlet at HighlandRadio.com or give us a call on 074 91 25000 we'll see you at the Highland Radio birthday bash okay and that birthday bash is on March 19th it's going to be a great night if you can get along please do if you want more information on tickets give us a call here 07 491 25000 or go to the hotel or call in as I say it's great for you to be a part of it if you can in relation to our your voice your community your voice to call us it's very disappointed with that interview you kept speaking about the problems they face but never once asked any of them how they can improve our perception of them reconciliation is a two-way street we had a conversation you know like why should they always have to defend themselves you know it's about a better understanding of them as individuals of a community we're all the same really fundamentally I'm not going to use an opportunity where and we're going to do it over the next while of course I'll challenge but do you know it's also good to focus on on the goods which at ways any bad in any section of society you know that's like saying if if if you know a settled person come on the show and talked about what they were doing but say yeah but I was you know I was in the looked at the paper today and the first four pages were where pick members of your community in courts you know because the general population doesn't the settled population doesn't have to if the white settled population doesn't have to deal with that they're not challenged every turn that there are bad apples so why every so I wanted to have an opportunity where we talked about positivity as well Michael McGarvey's director of water and environment with Donegal County Council with responsibility for the private enhanced effective blocks grant scheme Michael good morning to you thanks for joining us good morning Greg and we have the positive news it was we had it flagged that it could have been the end of next week or the start of this week but be that may be that as it may is the week this week sorry the online portal for the enhanced effective concrete blocks grant scheme is now open yeah I'm delighted to say Greg and thanks for having us on here look in the first instance supposed to acknowledge here the the people affected but that to respect the homeowners in the first instance you know this it's a lot of trauma and uncertain the people are going through so it is something that hopefully that this will help them in their journey and that that's in the first instance supposed to end the homeowners representative groups the competent building professors and their contractors you know the homeowners liaison officers the elected members and and also the department so and and as well as that maybe the staff and also just want to acknowledge that the first foot but we are delighted before we go on to the portal because I want to ask you specifically about that but the the council's effective concrete block grant office has been busy perhaps not as busy as some might like but quite a bit quite a number quite an amount of payment claims have been processed to date yeah and well I would say in the first instance Greg extremely busy and I just want to acknowledge that first of all and I know it's been frustrating for people people talk about you know a vacuum and information I suppose that's one of the reasons we want to get out there we've oppressed release out today as well and we'd hopefully do more of that communicating and getting that clarity but they have been extremely busy and I would say right right up until Christmas and in the week since then right through last weekend I can staff work till 8 o'clock Friday even right through Saturday and Sunday and the last number of days so very busy but I would say just as you said there yeah and since the scheme opened that we've 21 million processed for 112 applicants and we continue to do that and will continue what I would say is well Greg that the portal isn't just opening the portal has been open but that basically that it's now available to more of the applicants out there so that there's over 365 applicants out there now who will have access and see where they are in the process the payment have received etc right talk to us about the function of this portal then so presumably it's at a stage of the process that a homeowner is given access to this portal because you talked of it being opened to a limited number that's now been expanded expanded to over 350 so the portal becomes available to a victim of this crisis at what point on this journey through the scheme I suppose what I would say in the first instance and we'd maybe there's good information available on the council's website I would say in the first www.donniegallcoco.ai of people clicking that one of the first links that they'll see there is the enhanced effective concrete block scheme there's good information on there so I'd suggest anybody who's even thinking of entering or has been on it that's a very good source of information and what people can do they're even thinking whether or not they want to register in the first instance and they can go on there and they can actually the homeowners themselves can register and they get a username and a password and after that then they can get information on what's available and any applications they submit they can do it online through the portal etc and that's where they get messages back as to if there's further information or just progress being made in their application all right so but what what does the portal what service does it provide and at what point does someone get access to it well as I said there that's basically they can if they have already registered they can go on there and and get access further access to more people today but people who haven't yet access they can still register on there as I said so people can go on to the website see how to okay so just to be clear so just to be clear I've got cracks in my house um the an engineer I've got an engineer out he's determined that it matches the criteria for it to be referred to be bored right have I access to the portal at that point yeah you can go on there people can actually access in the first instance and go on and um what they get the application form set I would suggest that people after just starting off that they go to the the www.tronicall.co website they'll get the information but they'll also get information there of how to register on the portal they'll get information then on the application forms the steps that the follow etc when they complete those how to actually upload them on to the system and when there's updates then provided through the process this is going to be you know in some cases a long process through the different steps when they fall out their application when they engage their competent building professional they actually provide the BCA then the report the assessment which is then submitted back on through the portal that's referred when it's validated it's referred to the housing agency they'll then get word back again through the portal get messages there at what stage whether it's been approved or not approved for the meeting the minimum damage threshold etc and on so through the process in terms of you know receiving payments you know be rental storage a stage payment as part of the construction process that's all done through the portal and is it done timely if that's correct that's right yeah there's three parts supposed and the updated system release includes for applications and respect there's three I'm so this ancillary grant on the online portal firstly as opposed to the alternative accommodation where the relevant dwelling is no longer you know habitable or due to damage or where the alternative accommodations necessary during the carrying out the remediation work and there was 15,000 available for homeowners for that first option secondly then the ancillary grant also provides for storage costs and up to 5,000 for the contents of their homes while the remediation works are ongoing and lastly where immediate emergency repairs are required to be complete so they can apply through the portal and through the system again and that's at June of 5,000 and in terms of say for instance an inquiry so you know you know yourself there's going to be certain scenarios and we heard of one last week whereby someone had put a shed on the site and stored stuff in there and they were wondering would the 5,000 cover the cost of the shed I'm not asking you to respond to that individual case per se but what I'm saying is is that is there a human also that you can speak to if you need to appeal or clarify anything you know if something is a little bit sort of outside of the the simple yeah and again what I would say there there's very good information available in the first instance on the website and myself I wasn't involved directly until this until you know a few months ago and I was able to familiarise myself I found user friendly there's very good frequently asked questions sections there as well but there's also on the system that for people want to submit queries they can email in queries they can put them in through there again through the portal when they register and that they we do try and respond of what we are trying to do is professionally this as much as possible we've a very dedicated team there we've technical staff we've administrative staff we've our information system staff and between us there's a team there and I suppose the focus has to be on trying to get information as accurately as possible and as quickly as possible to respond to the queries from the homeowners you know I'm not just saying it Greg but just but the point there really is I want to get that across that's where our focus is and will be and I suppose this system yes we'd like to have got some of this out sooner but we're absolutely focused that we'll get the turnaround so Greg Dancer just your question again emailing in the queries going on through the portal of force and so we're looking at as turnaround times as quickly as we can but there's also information on the website of when there's staff available to talk to applicants or the compliment but that's what I want to say what do what do people do who maybe they've literacy issues IT they've got IT limitations maybe they're older and can't act can't do this process digitally what support is there from the council for that group of people well there is a group and I would say look at what I did at the council there to help but they will need to engage if someone is concerned about their house or what they might do or what options they do have to engage a competent building professional they will be able to help them with a lot of the questions uploading I'm on about say if you're doing that in terms of uploading to the portal reading the writing that's there some might have an issue with some might not even be able to open the lid of a laptop what support is there for that group of people from the council to process their applications are you saying they need to get third party support or is the council going to support them no absolutely the council want to support them for sure but I did say and I think it's important to get that message across there in the first instance they still not in the first instance there's information available there we are able to deal with queries and like you said there are a lot of people do use emails etc and those that don't we have staff that are available they are that they're available the days they're available are on the website they're not but I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm really stuck I might make more points not being clear there are people out there that can't access the internet they can't read they can't click the links I'm looking at the page it's incredibly detailed but for them that's gobble de gooke is there any support for those people to say look I can't do this online I even maybe struggle to read or what have you is there any support from the staff to support those people is there any support from the council to help them with the application process or do they have to yeah there is party help no no Greg enough look I'm sorry if I haven't got the point across quickly I've already said there is without a doubt we have dedicated staff we actually have telephone availability there are dedicated as well as that Greg what I would say that there's actually dedicated homeless liaison officer available there and they can be contacted and they will sit what people talk them through the process and the council staff are available those details of when they're available and they are on the website so I'm sorry if I didn't get it across because that's very important I do understand that's good in terms of those who are out money for quite some time that they're entitled to refunds on does that include the testing costs that could be people like six, seven, eight grand waiting on that money or it could be other money in to do with storage or temporary accommodation that they're waiting will this portal accelerate those refunds where people are entitled to them do well and look at we have been able to and what I doubt and you we've heard it on your show and others as well there's people that would have liked this portal available earlier so they could actually claim through the portal and that's obviously what we're talking about here today we have been and have processed payments in the last number of weeks and months that and that's been ongoing as I said there's 21 million process so far outside of this but we are continuing to process payments what I would say now that people can claim through once they're registered once they've approved grant amounts etc that they can register and claim those and salary costs accommodation the immediate emergency repairs and storage costs and there are there I will mention there are there is a cohort of people out there who'd who'd incurred engineers expenses quite considerable engineers expenses before they were approved under the old scheme and I know that they are now being assessed through the new scheme by the housing agency and that they until they're approved until their options approved they have been able to recoup those costs I do know that we're in engagement what the elected members what the department is see how that can be actually expedited and that's something we're working hard working department on okay Michael I look forward to as you see fit or whatever or in terms of inquiries working with you to get as much information out there and support families out there through this platform as well as the other platforms at the council's expense so we look forward to that I know you're very fresh into the relatively fresh into the position Michael so we look forward to working together for the benefit of the the families and those on the scheme going forward yeah and we will then before we finish all please just in case people think oh it's already very well seen this year we are absolutely determined we make it easier for people we will work with them and hopefully we'll listen then you to see those improvements in the coming weeks and months that does make it easier for people in this journey which is very different for people and that includes the addition of more staff where needed and what have you but thank you very much for that Michael McGarvey director of water and the environment we've done a go count to council choose life choose fun choose not sitting at home getting bored choose something better something really fun choose Fundamania coming to the Brunswick movie bowl from March 1st choose regular junior or family wristbands and enjoy some of Europe's top thrill rides choose fun for all ages a legendary Fundamania event first to the 17th of March for details see fundamania.co.uk with Brennan's today's bread today we're driving the Citroen C4X on Dublin's most speed bumped road as voted by an online poll to test Citroen's progressive hydraulic cushion suspension the music is coming from a vinyl record playing on a record player set up in the back seat there comes a speed bump let's see if this record skips perfect went off without a scratch book a test slide in a Citroen today visit citroen.ie just like if a social live tickets from 25 euro are on sale now on sale now donning all ETBs for their education and training fair is on this Wednesday and Thursday in the Radisson Blue Hotel letter Kenny Wednesday evening is aimed at leaving search students their parents and anyone looking to upskill and on Thursday from 10 it's for anyone interested in full and part-time education or training opportunities join me John Breslin on Around the Northwest live from the fair on Thursday as we find out about some of the many options available in more than 100 venues across Donegal that's this Thursday live from Donegal ETBs for their education and training fair in the Radisson Blue Hotel letter Kenny other updates brought to you by Grant building a new home choose grants a triple plus rated air owner air to water heat pump and you flex under floor heating visit grant.ie okay today we'll be cold with sunny spills and showers of rain or hail with a chance of thunder temperatures five to seven degrees with moderate to fresh gusty west to southwest winds now our competition winners today they're heading they're heading up to Fundomania the answer correctly was Balaba Fay Frankie Quinn Alstern Auler Frankie just across the bridge actually was the answer well done you've got a family passed to that amazing event running from the first to the 17th of March and also Denis O'Donnell out in manner Denis you are also taking your family for a fun day of entertainment we've another set of passes to give away tomorrow and I just want to mention too that Don John Breslin he is the Don I suppose John Breslin quite literally is out and around the Northwest is coming live today from the Radisson Hotel for the Donegal ETBs 2024 further education and training fair which is really well worth going down to you know whether you are starting out in your career or maybe you want to change your career or to look at different options it's all there in the one spot down at the Radisson Hotel stay tuned because John Breslin is going to give you much more information in relation to that now one of the highlights set for me last year was the whole process of the community hero and particularly its culmination with our community hero being selected that was for 2023 it is back for 2024 and heading that up is our head of sales here at Highland Radio Sean Quinn so it is officially being launched today community hero 2024 so I suppose Sean from the get go for new listeners or those that this passed by talk to me about the community hero 2024 yeah so we're I suppose what we're doing Greg is we're trying to grow on what we did in 2023 we had a we had a nightmare in that room remember trying to pick a winner because there was so many entries that were so deserving so what we tried to do is we looked at it and said how can we go and how can we award multiple people for the things that they do in the community and again we've been very fortunate and we've got a generous listener who has donated some money towards this as well and he's been very good to us over the last 12 months and what he wanted to do also was to reward those people that are they go beyond the call of duty they make that extra call at night they don't look at the clock they are just part of the community to help people so today what we're doing is we're asking people to nominate somebody that they feel goes beyond that call who is part of the community and what we'd love to do is we'd love to have five winners and what we were going to do is we're going to give them one thousand euros each to do what they want to do with it it's entirely up it could be a holiday it could be a tank of oil it could be whatever it might be and this is not limited to but this is to give an idea people who work in the community tirelessly could be tidy tans could be carers could be volunteers in any other area they're going the extra mile that person's jumping out to you in your mind now as you're listening but don't be confined by the suggestions you've heard from me or for Sean this is open to interpretation people work in their communities in all different ways Sean but as I say I think as you mold over the category not the categories but the suggestions there and I there are names hopping into my head that are worthy of a nomination and that thousand could be going towards their cause it could just be going towards them that's up to them we're not we're not worried about that or that's up to them but this is about recognizing five individuals right across our region here yeah and you know it's a great opportunity to it could be that somebody's using their own petrol money to to go and visit people in the night time that there is every every person has an opportunity to vote that for that person now because there's five people that are going to be rewarded and it's a nice thing to do in a nice time of year a public thanks and the prize is a lovely bonus but this is about recognizing people yeah yeah and we're going to make it really simple because last year we got a lot of we got a lot of letters and we got emails and outlining why that person should win we want that again this year and in your words why do you think they should win and and what we'll do is we have a panel of judges who will sit down deliberate and come up with what we hope will be the best five that will develop and it's not a writing competition no absolutely not so don't worry about that in as simple as you want but as much detail is better as well tell us why you want to nominate someone as I say it's not we're not basing the show and I'm correcting them saying it's about the person and their qualities not how that's articulated the more detail the better of course but I don't want anyone to be put off thinking well I'm not a great it's not about that it's not a writing competition it's about in your own heartfelt words why this person is special to five people will be honoured and each of them then will also receive a gift of a thousand-year-old each thanks to a generous listener who wants to work with us in what we're doing and support what we're doing here as well how do you go about nominating someone so we've talked a little bit about how you know you can write a letter you can do an email show them take it up take it so so if you want to do my email it's the email address is heroathighlandradio.com or if you want to write to us and feel free to do that as well it's so it's Highland Radio mountaintop letter Kenny County Dunny Gull and we'll that'll come to me the we obviously have to have a closing date for this so it's the 18th of March is the closing date for entries and what we'll do is we're going to try and do this pre-easter if we can I don't know when Easter is it's it's the end of March it's right at the end of March so we're we're going to try and do this now what I'd love to do is we'd love to have a little bit of a secret element to this as well so when you're nominating somebody please give us your details as well phone number that what we can do is we can ring you we can get more understanding of this person and we if they're lucky enough absolutely if if they're lucky enough what we can do then is we can work with that person to to try and give them a surprise of Easter and you know if somebody lands in and you're in a coffee shop or in your work and we'll have a check for a thousand euros it's not a lovely thing to do isn't it and an Easter egg well we might throw an Easter egg in there too some leftover shamrock you heard it live now Greg is going to donate Easter eggs for everybody all right yo okay so listen it really couldn't be any simpler and the more we explain we could be at risk of complicating it not you shown me it couldn't be simpler you know that person in your life who works really hard in the community and for others they go that extra mile as Sean said for neighbours and friends or for the community as a whole five of them will be selected and honoured as community heroes and each will be gifted a thousand euro if we can sort of jazz it up a little bit and surprise them all well and good so include include who they are and also a little contact detail for you the closing date's the 18th of March we'd love to get it all done in the last week of March as well because what a lovely way to to head into that Easter break more information at highlandradio.com but it isn't it's very simple email name address and reason why and your contact details to hero at highlandradio.com we'll post your nomination to Highland Radio mountain top letter Kenny Cantadonegore we'll get it absolutely absolutely thank you so very much indeed pleasure we'll mention that again in the not too distant future we've loads of exciting wee things that we're going to be announcing over the next wee while but I'm going to depart now thanks to Caroline and Shannon working on the show Caroline researching and producing we're back with you tomorrow morning at nine with the Friday panel and John Breslin's live from the Radisson after the news and obituary


What's up guys, takedown here and today we're opening up a nether munch pack. Now this actually wasn't supposed to be a continued series as you guys know in 2018.  Now I did make a subscription for it, that's how I got the first one. Problem is I forgot to cancel it and that's why I have this one. So instead of letting it go to waste I thought why not make another video for you guys. There is a code for munch pack to get $3 off your total purchase and that is review us. I'll put it on the screen, I'll leave a link in the description or maybe I'll just type it in the description.  Let's just get right into it. As always I got to get my knife and I'm going to try not to cut myself. Every time I have my knife I almost cut myself but not today. Let's just get right into it. First look right there. Now I actually found out what these all mean. It tells you that it was packed, shipped basically and an employee actually signed it. Nick, shout outs to Nick. What we are going to be doing is tasting it, putting it from best to worst. Starting off hopefully strong with tail chips it is zaps, New Orleans kettle style sour cream and onion. They look pretty good. The packaging looks good. My problem is there's a lobster just right there and you know how tape down does with seafood. Ship right there. It has a good coating.  There's the part I don't like but it has a bad aftertaste. So that one is going to be near the back right now. Of course I can change it anytime. Let's get into the next one. Company is dipping tops, popping candy. This is banana, wow I almost screwed that up. Banana split flavored popping candy with a candy coating. That was my finger. I'll be alright. Oh the scent, the smell. I'm just going to do a little bit just because I got so much to taste. That is the popping candy, can't really see it. Yep, yep it pops. I'm not usually a fan of candy, hard candy or anything. But this is a solid. This beats out of these chips right now. They had a bad aftertaste, there's nothing wrong with these. What is this? Oh okay, a fruit roll. Honestly I thought it was like a dog chew thing at first. This is sour apple fruit roll. You got to unravel this whole entire thing, just have a piece. Honestly that looks like snot. Let me rip off a piece. Let's save the rest. Just a little piece, it's really thin. I like a fruit roll up, but that tells me it's natural. Yeah it's sour. Honestly, that's not bad. It's not one of my favorite things I've tried. Next up we have pasty Mao Mao laggy. I wasn't expecting this. It's like, no it's a pastry, you can definitely smell it, it's a pastry. This is supposed to be cheese flavored. Sadly, they are in last place right now. Not the greatest. On to the next thing. Ooh, sweet. Sweet sour belts. I remember sour belts as a kid. You get quite a few in it. You get about four or five in it.  There's different versions of it. That's really good. The gummy part is harder. I will say that. Overall, they're not sour though. I'm fine with that. And I'm taking another bite so you already know it's good. Sweet sour belts. Beat out the sour apple fruit roll. Put it here. It is now in second place. Ooh, this looks good. Not sure where it's from. Not even sure how to pronounce it. Is that peanut butter? It kind of smells like peanut butter. You can't really see it. When packaging, you see it oozing out. This here, you can barely see it. Let's just try it. Definitely a cracker. It's like a cheese vibe to it though. It's really good. Does it beat out the popping candy? It does. Sublime. I'm assuming it's chocolate because that's the company. You guys know I rate chocolate pretty high. Let's go on to the next thing here. Ooh. Ghana. Dona. Just your average chocolate bar. That's really good. That's way better than a Snickers. First place. Let's go on to Nonda. Nonda. Nonda. It smells strong. That's what it looks like. Dead last. Tomahawk chips. These ones are fire chip. I like spicy snacks. Give you guys a better look. There's heat. I was going to say they're not hot. Ooh. They got a really good kick to them. Oh yeah. Never tried them before. Really good. Chip. Really good spices. I'd like to try their other flavors. Hopefully I'll contact the company. This gets first place. Chances are I got two snacks left so chances are first place is going to be gone to them. Next up I'm just going to go ahead and do the Mentos now. My mouth is still hot from the last one. These are Mentos Hawkins. I'm going to change up the lineup really quick because the Sublime chocolates and then I think about it should be below there. This is better than them. I'm going to try the Frenchy Petro. It's like a pretzel or cookie stick. Dipped in chocolate. Let's just try it. That's really good. Oh my god. I think chocolate won last time but that doesn't affect my decision this time. I'm going to have to give it to the spicy chips. I like spice.  So big crunch. I'm just going to say you guys get second place. That is the bonus snack for January's munchpack. Anyways great munchpack.  Use the code. Save yourself a few bucks. Honestly if this gets enough views maybe in another couple months down the line I might go and get one of the smaller ones maybe the five snack box ones. Honestly it depends on what you guys want. I'm over it now. I've done it twice. Made two videos on it. So if you guys want to see me do another one comment down below. Like this video. If not 2018 I got a lot of new stuff on its way. I will see you guys in the next one. Peace.


Hello, artists of all levels and art lovers.  Sadly, he passed away and they just want something to remember him by. I do a lot of portrait work of animals that have passed away and and living animals because they're just such great parts of our lives and this one is going to be a sketch instead of a painting or a drawing and So I'm going to show you what I'm going to be using here. Basically. I've just got some different pencils that are of different hardness and darkness here and I am probably going to be using white as well and perhaps maybe some some grays or other shades, but mostly just black and white and I've got Also, I wanted to show you how I sharpen these. I take this pencil here and I sharpen it basically with an Exacto blade so that I get this long part of the lead showing the reason for that is that you can shade wider areas instead of shading the whole thing with just the tip it's a nice way to get broader Shading areas and I also and there's an exacto blade. I just sharpen it with that and I also use this Sandpaper pad. It is basically a sandpaper pad with 12 removable sheets What do you do with this is it's great for sharpening your pencils when you have made the lead long like this so you can get a Wide way to sharpen it like that instead of you couldn't put this on a pencil sharpener in other words That would not work. So you can sharpen it on these and like I said, it's got the 12 removable pads. So when one of them is Doesn't have any sanded surface anymore. You just tear it off and use the next one. It's kind of a neat thing I'm also going to be using a kneaded eraser and just a regular sharpener for my white pencil And I'm also again going to be using this toned gray paper that I really like working on because you're already starting in this gray Value instead of my work is upside down in here because I'm left-handed and I don't like working with the ring here So that's why everything's upside down, but I love working on the gray paper because it's already a value that is kind of Lighter to medium instead of working on white paper. So anyway, this is how we're gonna get going here I'm glad you're with me and good drawing skills is the core and the foundation of any great artwork So even if you're interested in painting and color, I hope you'll stick around for this one Just to see if you can learn anything from this about drawing skills. So I'm glad you're here with me Oh, and I did an initial sketch. I always like to do a quick initial sketch. I'm not done with this one yet Just to work out my composition. I'm not quite sure if I'm gonna include his foot or not or just his head So it's always a good idea to do a quick composition sketch and here we go We're gonna get started here and I hope you enjoy this lesson and I hope I do camo justice you


stop whatever you are doing. Give this alert your full attention. This emergency alert is from the SCP Foundation, an international group concerned with your safety and security. The SCP Foundation is delivering this message with the authority of your national government, and you must pay close attention. If you have watched a local news broadcast in the last day, you have likely been exposed to an extremely dangerous anomaly. SCP 096 is a tall, emaciated humanoid which attacks and kills all who see its face. It cannot be stopped or seriously injured. Even seeing a photograph or video of SCP 096 is enough for it to find and kill someone. SCP 096 recently temporarily breached containment nearby. When a local news crew was active, they recorded SCP 096 from a distance. Their live story was broadcast in your area, and therefore approximately 10,000 people in your area have been exposed to SCP 096. If you watched a local news broadcast in the last day, you have been targeted by SCP 096, and must leave the area now. If you stay where you are you will draw SCP 096 to your area and will be put in your family and community at risk. If you have not recently watched a local news broadcast, you should immediately say goodbye to any friends or family members that have. Then, you should put on a blindfold to ensure you do not accidentally see SCP 096's face if it arrives in your area. You should also seek shelter somewhere secure to avoid becoming collateral damage if it is targeting someone close to you. Containment teams from the SCP Foundation will delay SCP 096 for as long as possible using artillery and high impact weaponry. SCP Foundation researchers are working on a method to permanently contain or terminate SCP 096. There are memetic components within this alert to help you remain calm and follow instructions. Please obey the SCP Foundation. Thank you for your attention and cooperation. Secure. Contain. Protect.