On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 7:04 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org 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).
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 the primary problem here is that koji does support neither external builders nor building on top of qemu emulation. However, COPR *does* support building on emulated architectures (that's how its armv7 and s390x support works there).
So, maybe adding a mock configuration for building RISC-V packages in qemu emulation, with the fedora repositories from http://fedora.riscv.rocks/koji/ as a base, could work until koji supports it? (I think that would involve either adding RISC-V hardware to Fedora Infrastructure, or adding support for emulated architectures to koji, or adding support for external builders to koji.)
Fabio