Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2019 17:06:39 +0800
From: Ruinland ChuanTzu Tsai <ruinland@andestech.com>
To: <~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org>
CC: <alankao@andestech.com>, <wangtc@andestech.com>, <sir@cmpwn.com>,
        <imruinland.cs00@g2.nctu.edu.tw>
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] Alpine Linux on RISC-V
Message-ID: <20191223090638.GA5220@APC301.andestech.com>
Reply-To: <BZ10XQZS99VQ.FHVCEIV5H9AT@homura>
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User-Agent: Mutt/1.9.4 (2018-02-28)

Hi Drew and everyone,
sorry for the late reply.
I had a badly full plate back then.

Though with limited accessibility, our dev boards are available for
borrowing or purchasement. Yet I cannot disclose too many details
regarding legal concerns. My supervisor has discussed with our
corresponding division and they will response to the thread in the
near future.

For the boot story :
Thanks for Drew's brilliant work, it only requires minor modifications
on scripts/bootstrap.sh and some packages' APKBUILDS to build the cross
compiler and sysroot-riscv32.

That said, due to some driver issues and the lack of ability to self-
host RV32 Alpine, I cooked up a RV32 initramfs out of the one for ARM
Alpine - - replace ARM binaries to RV32 ones, reconstruct symlinks and
tweak the bootargs in Device Tree.
For now, it could boot from OpenSBI to an alpine-base rootfs flawlessly.

Better still, I build the mkinitfs from aports so we would eventually
have it done in a better manner some other days.

We might host the mirror sites for Alpine RV64/RV32 package on academic
sites in Taiwan in the foreseeable future. We'd like to know that is
there any explicit/implicit policies should be applied ? (For instance,
FreeBSD strongly urges mirror sites to be IPv6 accessible.)

By the way, there are many things we can share for brining up stuffs on
our RV64 platform as well. 

Andes provides RISC-V IP, and we have our own FPGA-based platform to
test against. We have been implmenting HW/SW features on the platform
since the RISC-V port went upstream Linux two years ago.  To this day,
our 32-/64-bit, UP/SMP and other customized configurations work fine.

Before the FPGA and hardware design were ready, we had been playing
QEMU for quite a while, so the transition wasn't really a concern. If
any, the concern would be the gray area not covered by official
specification.

After such a long journey, we are here now. We would like to be involved
more in distribution community.  We tried the RISC-V port of OpenWRT/
buildroot/Yocto, and now looking into Alpine.

Many many thanks,
Ruinland