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In-Reply-To: <20191223090638.GA5220@APC301.andestech.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2019 14:49:55 -0500
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
From: "Drew DeVault" <sir@cmpwn.com>
To: <BZ10XQZS99VQ.FHVCEIV5H9AT@homura>,
 <~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org>
Message-Id: <BZJ0IQVRNPD7.124W13JDZTBXK@homura>

On Mon Dec 23, 2019 at 5:06 PM, Ruinland ChuanTzu Tsai wrote:
> Hi Drew and everyone,
> sorry for the late reply.
> I had a badly full plate back then.

Sorry myself, I've been travelling for the holidays since receiving your
email.

> 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.

Cool. I would be interested in picking one up for working on the Alpine
port with. If you get the boot story in good shape, then we could
potentially support rv32 upstream even before we support rv64.

> 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.

So long as we can pull a kernel and initrd out of the filesystem, rather
than baked into something weird (for example, the BMC approach of
sticking it on a magic partition with an initrd baked in), then we'll be
in good shape. The rest is just implementation details, we can sort this
out. Let's focus on the "boot from filesystem" part and worry about the
other details separately.

> 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.)

Too early to discuss the mirroring concerns, but there is some info
here:

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/How_to_setup_a_Alpine_Linux_mirror

You can write to ~alpine/mirrors@lists.alpinelinux.org once you have
yours set up.

> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.

Looking forward to it!