On Mon, Oct 04, 2021 at 01:03:27PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
Hi all! I just got back from Open Source Summit, several of the talks
I
found interesting were on RISC-V -- a high-level one about the
organizational structure, and Drew Fustini's more technical talk.
In that, he noted that there's a Fedora build *, but it isn't an official
Fedora arch. As I understand it, the major infrastructure blocker is simply
that there isn't server-class hardware (let alone hardware that will build
fast enough that it isn't a frustrating bottleneck).
The hardware situation is actually not terrible now (albeit still very
expensive). HiFive Unmatched is a very solid platform that supports
mini ITX, a decent amount of RAM, M.2 SSD, AMD Radeon GPU. You can
build a reasonable desktop-style machine with one of the boards.
For servers there are several missing components:
- Any kind of BMC or remote management. You can add a Raspberry
Pi-based KVM hat (assuming you're happy with that incongruity)
- UEFI, although it's coming and u-boot works OK.
Qemu also works very well if you don't want or more likely can't
afford the hardware.
So, one question is: if we used, say, ARM or x86_64 Amazon cloud
instances
as builders, could we build fast enough under QEMU emulation to work? We
have a nice early advantage, but if we don't keep moving, we'll lose that.
But beyond that: What other things might be limits? Are there key bits of
the distro which don't build yet? Is there a big enough risc-v team to
respond to arch-specific build failures? And, do we have enough people to do
QA around release time?
I think we have most things covered. Hardware doesn't support
virtualization but Qemu does. Hardware doesn't support various
desirable features like the vector extension. Also it'd be nice to
have a JDK port.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog:
http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests.
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v