My talk from the RISC-V workshop in Barcelona

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Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGA bitstream reverse engineered

While my article on HN is getting no traction I might as well post on here some fantastic news: The Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGA bitstream has been reverse engineered by Clifford Wolf.

For some context this is a very popular and cheap series of FPGA devices. For example you can buy the Arty board which has one of these FPGAs for $99, or the slightly more advanced Nexys 4 DDR for $265.

Currently you must use the Xilinx Vivado tool which is a 40 GB download [no, that isn’t a typo], requires a paid license to unlock the full features, and is generally awful to use.

This work should eventually lead to a complete open source toolchain to program these devices, just like Project IceStore for the Lattice devices.

RISC-V workshop

I’m giving a talk tomorrow afternoon about Fedora on RISC-V.

Dockerfile for running libguestfs, virt-tools and virt-v2v

FROM fedora
RUN dnf install -y libguestfs libguestfs-tools-c virt-v2v \
                   libvirt-daemon libvirt-daemon-config-network

# https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1045069
RUN useradd -ms /bin/bash v2v
USER v2v
WORKDIR /home/v2v

# This is required for virt-v2v because neither systemd nor
# root libvirtd runs, and therefore there is no virbr0, and
# therefore virt-v2v cannot set up the network through libvirt.
ENV LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND direct

“RISCY BUSINESS” runs Fedora in a chroot on HiFive Unleashed

Note you can now run Fedora directly, see the instructions here:

https://fedorapeople.org/groups/risc-v/disk-images/hifive-unleased/

https://github.com/rwmjones/fedora-riscv-kernel/tree/sifive_u540

RISC-V 8th Workshop Agenda

The RISC-V 8th Workshop is happening in Barcelona next month and the agenda and speakers have been announced:

https://tmt.knect365.com/risc-v-workshop-barcelona/agenda/2

David Abdurachmanov and myself are giving a short talk about Fedora on RISC-V at 4pm on Tuesday 8th May.

Public service announcement: NFSv4 doesn’t work with Linux nfsroot

It just doesn’t work. Nothing in the documentation hints at this, but it’ll save you a lot of time to know it doesn’t work. You have to use NFSv3 for nfsroot.