University of Toronto Open Source Students (UTOSS)

New Project Areas - During the first year of UTOSS, our hardware and software divisions have made significant progress in project areas no other previous undergraduate engineering club has pursued: large open source projects and computer architecture. Our CPU core design team has successfully implemented a multi-cycle 32-bit RISC-V processor using the SystemVerilog hardware description language. This processor core can run basic assembly instructions and adheres to the RISC-V instruction set architecture, an open source format that is becoming increasingly common in the microprocessor design industry. Furthermore, students on the CPU team have researched and implemented a version of the semiconductor industry’s ASIC design flow that only utilizes free and open source tools all the way from high level architecture to silicon design, design verification and prototyping. These accomplishments from the hardware divisions have exposed members to digital systems design and verification concepts valued by PEY Co-op employers in the silicon design industry.

Browser Contributions - Meanwhile, the software division has been making consistent contributions to Knative, enterprise extensions for Kubernetes, and Firefox, an open-source web browser used by 150 million people worldwide. Students on the Firefox team have contributed 17 bug fixes to the Firefox browser, spanning everything from front-end UI changes to low-level memory management. Through contributing to these large projects, software division members have not only been honing their C/C++ and JavaScript programming skills but also were able to learn from industry professionals. Students have connected with software engineers around the world who have also been contributing to Firefox, and a site visit to the Mozilla (the corporate owner of Firefox) office in Toronto was organized.

CPU Design Workshop - To provide interested students in the U of T community with an introduction to the technical concepts most often used at UTOSS, the hardware division held an introduction to CPU design workshop, while the software division organized a Git workshop in collaboration with UTMIST and a workshop dedicated to open-source LLM applications in collaboration with UofTHacks. These events helped us build connections with other engineering student clubs whose visions overlapped with that of ours, as well as positively impact the broader U of T community.