Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

The RISC-V experience

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 15th of January 2022 01:44:03 PM Filed under
Development
Hardware

I’m writing to you from a Sway session on Alpine Linux, which is to say from a setup quite similar to the one I usually write blog posts on, save for one important factor: a RISC-V CPU.

I’ll state upfront that what I’m using is not a very practical system. What I’m going to describe is all of the impractical hacks and workarounds I have used to build a “useful” RISC-V system on which I can mostly conduct my usual work. It has been an interesting exercise, and it bodes well for the future of RISC-V, but for all practical purposes the promise of RISC-V still lives in tomorrow, not today.

In December of 2018, I wrote an article about the process of bootstrapping Alpine Linux for RISC-V on the HiFive Unleashed board. This board was essentially a crappy SoC built around a RISC-V CPU: a microSD slot, GPIO pins, an ethernet port, a little bit of RAM, and the CPU itself, in a custom form-factor.1 Today I’m writing this on the HiFive Unmatched, which is a big step up: it’s a Mini-ITX form factor (that is, it fits in a standardized PC case) with 16G of RAM, and the ethernet, microSD, and GPIO ports are complemented with a very useful set of additional I/O via two M.2 slots, a PCIe slot, and a USB 3 controller, plus an SPI flash chip. I have an NVMe drive with my root filesystem on it and an AMD Radeon Pro WX 2100 GPU installed. In form, it essentially functions like a standard PC workstation.

I have been gradually working on bringing this system up to the standards that I expect from a useful PC, namely that it can run upstream Alpine Linux with minimal fuss. This was not really possible on the previous SiFive hardware, but I have got pretty close on this machine. I had to go to some lengths to get u-Boot to provide a working UEFI environment,2 and I had to patch grub as well, but the result is that I can write a standard Alpine ISO to a USB stick, then boot it and install Alpine onto an NVMe normally, which then boots itself with UEFI with no further fiddling. I interact with it through three means: the on-board UART via a micro-USB cable (necessary to interact with u-Boot, grub, or the early Linux environment), or ethernet (once sshd is up), or with keyboard, mouse, and displays connected to the GPU.

Read more

»

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.

More on Tux Machines: About ● Gallery ● Forum ● Blogs ● Search ● News ● RSS Feed

Part of Bytes Media ● Sister sites below.

TechBytes Techrights button

Powered by Drupal, an open source content management system

Content available under CC-BY-SA CC

© by original authors

Powered by CentOS 6.5 (GNU/Linux), Varnish, and Drupal 6