[colug-432] RISC V effort, and distribution building

[R P Herrold]

Nice COLUG meeting

I mentioned a current RISC V synthetic machine family (with a 
tangible one coming).  RISC V has a large number of options -- 
register count, presence of hardware maths, bus widths, more.  
The useful target has 'all' of the processor features, and the 
64 bit bus, which is the 'big' $1k unit mentioned below, and 
which represents real competition to ARM's campaign to get 
into the DC

https://riscv.org/


Outlinks to the processor design details and philosophy

https://riscv.org/risc-v-foundation/

https://www.sifive.com/

There is a low power preliminary item available on short 
delivery turn.  I have contributed a couple times to this and 
I see that I am listed on their 'backers' page -- sort of a 
surprise.  I found that these 'arduino profile' boards are not 
powerful enough, nor 'sufficiently' ram'd to handle much of a 
distribution, beyond what one gets on a re-purposed wireless 
router and DD-WRT or such.  The sifive folks are 
slip-streaming in fixes / improvements to the chip over time

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1

https://www.sifive.com/documentation/chips/freedom-e310-g000-manual/

https://www.sifive.com/documentation/chips/freedom-e310-g000-datasheet/

https://info.sifive.com/the-sifive-download-part-vi
 (newsletter)

https://www.sifive.com/blog/


working up toward a release the big kahuna, already in the 
pipeline

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed

The eight SMA RF connectors to use impedance controlled 
transmission lines are intriguing -- one assumes multi-gigibit 
per second serial commo channels to sub-systems.  I've seen 
approaches like that in IBM mainframe kit on the Z and Power 
families


https://github.com/riscv/riscv-pk

some random links

https://github.com/rwmjones/fedora-riscv-bootstrap/

https://fedorapeople.org/groups/risc-v/RPMS/

his builder described, and the stage 1 packages 

https://github.com/rwmjones/fedora-riscv

Much of the package queueing and re-queueing, when improperly 
solved dependencies and problems with prior builds are spotted 
are manual.  They are working toward get a Koji (Fedora's 
Swiss army knife tool for managing lots of packages), and Mock 
(a builder, which can chroot, and depsolve) going

As that that pair of build automation should then be able to 
walk through the build rounds the needed 4 times (against the 
software simulation, as they await generally available 
hardware -- they have some access to one)

It does not QA it of course, but it gets rid of the monkey 
work of resubmission


I run something similar with a pair called:
	drunkard-build.sh
and its friend:
	rph-rpmbuild.sh
and NFS, and a thoughtfully designed directory structure, and 
mirroring of SRPMs.  tool:
	srcfind
says I presently have"
	847611 /home/herrold/.tmp/srcfind.sh.cache.txt
	7862 /home/herrold/.tmp/srcfind.sh.cache-ORC.txt
rather a lot of packages  ;)


Some of the tools used for the cAos (post Red Hat 
RHL -> RHEL cut-over) buildsystem are out at:
	ftp://ftp.owlriver.com/pub/mirror/ORC/buildfarm/

and a support note to get people going burning our first 
bootable ISO (cinch) which had custom initscripts
	http://www.owlriver.com/projects/caos/cd-burning/


back to RISC-V

http://delorie.com/riscv/rpm-install-latest.html

QEMU provides a cross compile environment

	https://github.com/riscv/riscv-qemu/commits/qemu-upstream-v5

The distribution (fedora / Rawhide) building is on 
irc.freenode.net in channel: #fedora-riscv

I have back logs as follows

./2017/freenode/#fedora-riscv.12.log
./2018/freenode/#fedora-riscv.02.log
./2018/freenode/#fedora-riscv.01.log
./2018/freenode/#fedora-riscv.03.log

If interested, lemme know and I can post.  I don't currently 
have a preferred 'mark-up' tool for raw IRC logs -- I have 
written such in the last for CentOS, but was never happy with 
it.  It really needed extension to do multiple passes and find 
the more frequent posters for colorization, to better suppress 
management messages like /part and /join and some other stuff 
I am forgetting off the top of my head

-- Russ herrold