Now building Fedora/RISC-V “stage4” disk images

I’m happy to announce that Fedora/RISC-V, the project to bootstrap Fedora on the new RISC-V architecture, has reached a key milestone: We are now releasing clean “stage4” disk images which are built entirely from RPMs (ie. every file except two[1] are managed by RPM).

You can get the latest image from http://oirase.annexia.org/riscv/

To use it, you must enable my RISC-V tools copr:

# dnf copr enable rjones/riscv
# dnf install riscv-qemu riscv-pk

and you can then boot the stage4 directly using this qemu command[2]:

$ qemu-system-riscv -m 4G -kernel /usr/bin/bbl \
    -append vmlinux \
    -drive file=stage4-disk.img,format=raw -nographic

This is an early release and there are a few problems. The main one is that we lack a util-linux package, and thus there is no mount command so the disk image stays read-only after boot. You’ll see lots of errors like this at boot:

/init: line 16: mount: command not found
/init: line 19: mount: command not found
/init: line 20: mount: command not found

I hope to get that fixed soon.

There’s also no actual rpm command in the stage4, again because of a required dependency, and again that’s something that will be fixed real soon.

Many thanks go to David Abdurachmanov and Stefan O’Rear for their huge efforts building packages.

Notes:

[1] Because there is no systemd package yet, currently two extra files are added to the disk image which are not under the control of RPM: /init and /usr/bin/poweroff

[2] For real hardware, read this page