microwatt VS VexRiscvBPluginGenerator

My favorite part of this project is the pretty large battery of test cases. A lot of chip rtl releases don't bother with open sourcing the verification too, and that's arguably more useful than the rtl in the first place.

https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt/tree/master/test...

MicroWatt is the only one I know of.

https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt

I have several OpenPOWER systems, including the POWER9 I use as my usual desktop. Besides IBM and other server manufacturers like Tyan and Wistron, you can get them as Raptor workstations and servers.

If you want an OpenPOWER design to play with, look at Microwatt ( https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt ) which is complete enough to boot Linux.

Not true, as of 2019 the power ISA is able to be used without needing to pay any royalties to ibm under the openpower foundation. There's already a few projects that have taken advantage of it such as libreSOC and Microwatt. Source code for various firmware components are also freely available pertaining to the power platform.

https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt is an example of a Linux-capable 64-bit core that has been submitted on multiple Open MPW shuttles:

GitHub https://github.com/openpower-cores https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt

At the other end of the scale, if anyone wants to play you can run a little openpower CPU on a FPGA with completely open source. https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt

It's capable of running Linux, some example docs are https://shenki.github.io/boot-linux-on-microwatt/

Why dismiss POWER or SPARC ? :-)

I'd say beyond availability, the primary advantage for embedded use it the adaptability of the ISA. If you just need a small microcontroller, the core can be very small; if you need some specific performance point, you can use a bigger core, some extensions (or part thereof) could help, and you can always roll your own instructions in the 'custom' opcode space to reach your goals.