Re: RISCV porting effort

[Gabriel Wicki <gabriel@erlikon.ch>]

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?


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