On Mon, Oct 04, 2021 at 01:03:27PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
Hi all! I just got back from Open Source Summit, several of the talks I found interesting were on RISC-V -- a high-level one about the organizational structure, and Drew Fustini's more technical talk.
In that, he noted that there's a Fedora build *, but it isn't an official Fedora arch. As I understand it, the major infrastructure blocker is simply that there isn't server-class hardware (let alone hardware that will build fast enough that it isn't a frustrating bottleneck).
The hardware situation is actually not terrible now (albeit still very expensive). HiFive Unmatched is a very solid platform that supports mini ITX, a decent amount of RAM, M.2 SSD, AMD Radeon GPU. You can build a reasonable desktop-style machine with one of the boards.
For servers there are several missing components:
- Any kind of BMC or remote management. You can add a Raspberry Pi-based KVM hat (assuming you're happy with that incongruity)
- UEFI, although it's coming and u-boot works OK.
Qemu also works very well if you don't want or more likely can't afford the hardware.
So, one question is: if we used, say, ARM or x86_64 Amazon cloud instances as builders, could we build fast enough under QEMU emulation to work? We have a nice early advantage, but if we don't keep moving, we'll lose that.
But beyond that: What other things might be limits? Are there key bits of the distro which don't build yet? Is there a big enough risc-v team to respond to arch-specific build failures? And, do we have enough people to do QA around release time?
I think we have most things covered. Hardware doesn't support virtualization but Qemu does. Hardware doesn't support various desirable features like the vector extension. Also it'd be nice to have a JDK port.
Rich.