On 07/26/2016 10:36 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

RISC-V is an open source instruction set architecture (ISA).

I was broadly looking at what it would take to support RISC-V in
Fedora,

Yay! great idea, and I hope RISC-V will gain broad acceptance, e.g. in the IOT field. ARM is great and ubiquitous, but with ARM just bought by a mysterious Japanese conglomerate it's nice to have a more open alternative.

 - There are currently some proprietary bits in the bitstream, but I
   hope those will be removed at some point.

Obviously the last point makes this moot right now, but assuming that
can be fixed, here is my question: Can we package these bitstream
files in Fedora?  It would allow a more immediate out-of-the-box
experience where you just plug in the development kit and go.

Why are the proprietary bits in this case problematic, if we have proprietary bits in the context of module (e.g. wireless) firmware and CPU microcode patches?

By the way, while the FPGA bitstream generation in general is still highly proprietary, there is a break in the wall: Clifford Wolff developed an open-source FPGA toolchain for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ .
Now, iCE40 is a fairly simple FPGA---that's why it was possible to develop a non-proprietary toolchain for it. I am not sure what limitations it imposes on the RISC-V flavor that fits on it----Clifford has compiled PicoRV32 which I think is not suitable to run Linux, but I am sure the rest is just a SMOP :) https://github.com/cliffordwolf/icotools/tree/master/icosoc