Re: RISCV porting effort

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Wed, Jun 09, 2021 at 12:28:22AM +0200, Gabriel Wicki wrote:
> Hello everyone!
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Do i understand correctly that the bootstrap-tarballs can be
> cross-compiled and tested (to some extent) in a qemu-system-riscv? Or does
> this *have* to fail (by Guix's design) due to it not being bootstrappable?
> 

They get cross compiled from another architecture, using the package
definitions in gnu/packages/make-bootstrap.scm. From what I've seen
online, it should be possible to boot Ubuntu's riscv64 image using qemu.
I haven't tried enabling riscv64 support in my binfmt service and
try building on my main machine.

> 
> On Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 03:43:44PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > 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?
> I could see myself doing that. I've been thinking about getting a HiFive
> Unmatched for a while and getting the hardware makes working on it a bit
> more exciting!
> 
> Do i understand correctly that this machine would then be used to
> build Guix packages and serve them? I.e. a worker on ci.guix.gnu.org?
> 
> 
> Have a nice week!
> gabriel
> 

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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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