Re: RISCV porting effort

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello!

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> skribis:

> Porting Guix comes with two parts: building the bootstrap-tarballs and
> adding support for the new architecture in (gnu packages bootstrap).
> Support for riscv was added to GCC with 7.1.0 so I had to bump the
> bootstrap GCC to 7 (and adjust some inputs), and guile-2.0.14 didn't
> known the endianness of riscv64 so instead of patching it I bumped the
> bootstrap guile to 3.0. I uploaded my bootstrap-tarballs to my regular
> spot after signing them and switched over to the riscv machine.
>
> Building Guix from sources is much easier thanks to the work of Vagrant,
> I was able to apt install most of the dependencies on riscv. The
> packaged version of guile-zlib was too old in 21.04 so I built that from
> source (0.1.0 is available in Debian experimental), and I also had to
> build gnutls from source for the guile-3.0 bindings. I added the riscv
> binaries to (gnu packages bootstrap) and temporarily switched the
> raw-build function to look for 3.0 guile libraries instead of 2.0.
>
> Where I'm at right now:
> Downloading using the daemon (builtin:download) fails currently, it says
> it doesn't have permissions to open-file to write downloaded files to
> the store.
> I haven't built anything using the bootstrap binaries to see if they
> actually work yet.

Exciting news!  I saw discussions about this ‘guix perform-download’
issue on IRC.  Did you eventually find what the problem is?

If the HiFive works fine, let me remind you that we have budget to buy
hardware, so we could just as well order a couple of these right away
(maybe you’ll have Guix System running by the time we receive them ;-)).

What we need is someone to order the machine(s) and to host it
afterwards, with stable connectivity.  This must be agreed upon by the
Spending Committee (currently Tobias, Ricardo, and myself; email
guix-finance@gnu.org).  You’ll then be reimbursed by the FSF, our
current fiscal sponsor.

Any takers?  Or should we wait until you have more experience with
yours, Efraim?

Thanks,
Ludo’.