FYI: Fedora/RISC-V second bootstrap
I thought I'd be interesting to say something about Fedora on RISC-V
to a wider audience ... and there's some news too.
First the basics: RISC-V is a free and open Instruction Set
Architecture (ISA). You can read more about it on the RISC-V
Foundation's website here:
https://riscv.org/
Fedora/RISC-V is a project to port Fedora to RISC-V. Actual, real
64-bit RISC-V hardware you can buy is going to be released in Q1 2018
(it's already sampling to a few lucky developers), and I want Fedora
to be the first choice to run on that hardware.
The Fedora/RISC-V project web pages are here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V
We started this back in September 2016 but it's been on a bit of a
hiatus partly because of lack of hardware but mainly because the ABIs
between userland and the kernel were not stable. They still aren't
stable, but there's some hope that glibc changes will go upstream[1]
in February (glibc 2.27), meaning that the final ABI will be nailed
down and we can reasonably develop a Linux distro on top.
In anticipation of glibc finally providing a stable ABI I've been
bootstrapping Fedora/RISC-V from scratch a second time. You can read
the status of that effort here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V/Bootstrapping
https://github.com/rwmjones/fedora-riscv-bootstrap
TL;DR there's a working stage 3 disk image which I'm using to build
the stage 4 RPMs.
We'll need to do a third and final bootstrap after the glibc changes
go upstream, so this second bootstrap is just for practice.
Rich.
[1] Latest glibc patches for review:
https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2017-12/msg00706.html
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Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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