--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Andrew M.A. Cater amacater@galactic.demon.co.uk wrote:
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 09:08:42AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
so, any ideas, input etc. welcomed.
Talk to Debian for the software, obvs :)
yes - on it :) debian-riscv. there's also fedora-riscv.
They have most things packaged somwehere and ties to Debian Edu/Skolelinux. The problem, if problem it is, is that you need a new port to do this well and that means good emulators and, eventually, fast build hardware.
yehyeh. right now they're running under qemu, which is not the way you're supposed to do it, but they at least have a base suite of packages compiled up, the bootstrapping's been done.
RISCv64 also needs to be well supported by the Linux kernel, so you probably need to make sure that there's an easy way to build the Linux kernel (GCC build chain and GNU tools ... )
yehyeh, the riscv-kernel has been up and running for a long time, now, the most important thing is the acceptance of the riscv-gcc patches (done recently) and also libc6 and binutils patches.
also there's an outstanding bugreport for debian which "finalises" the strings (architecture names) and the port names and also they *must* have the support of the *exact* same versions of binutils and gcc which are utilised *right* across the board for every other debian architecture.
this is absolutely critical for stability, otherwise you can't guarantee that packages will be properly compiled and dynamically link together.
so it's a chain that's slowly propagating and sorting itself out... and being handled.
what i meant by software is things like, for example... if we get a 3D engine up and running (however it's done), that *will* need mesa3d support to be made for it. and/or vulkan, and/or whatever the flavour-of-the-month for accelerated graphics happens to be.
likewise if we add a VPU, someone has to do the.... whatever-it-is, ffmpeg, gstreamer, blah-blah porting and so on.
there are lots of little details that need someone to work on *AT THE SAME TIME* as the actual hardware *ITSELF* is being developed (!!).
it's quite an interesting and tricky self-bootstrapping problem that will require quite a bit of thought and careful planning.
l.