Raspberry Pi 4 running Fedora 32

I got Fedora 32 installed on an RPi 4 8GB, booting off USB, with UEFI and ACPI. I followed Robert Grimm’s instructions here, and had an additional set of complications summarised here. There’s not much to say except that it was fiendishly complicated. But it works beautifully now, and is reasonably quick too especially when you consider how little it cost.

So let’s talk about costs (all include tax and delivery):

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB	£77.33
Case	£10.99
SanDisk 500GB SSD x 2	£149.98
small SD card needed for booting	£free

Only one of the SSDs is actually used, but if you follow Robert’s instructions you will need two. I didn’t have any external USB SSDs that were both USB 3 and not spinning hard disks, so I had to buy these, but I’ll be able to reuse one in a future project. The SD card is required to work around a bug in the UEFI firmware, but I happened to have one lying around.

OCaml RISC-V port is now upstream!

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/commit/8f3833c4d0ef656c826359f4137c1eb3d46ea0ef

We’ve been using this patch in Fedora since Nov 2016.

Fedora/RISC-V now mirrored as a Fedora “alternative” architecture

https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/risc-v/repo/fedora/29/latest/. These packages now get mirrored further by the Fedora mirror system, eg. to https://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/alt/risc-v/repo/fedora/29/latest/

If you grab the latest nightly Fedora builds you can get the mirrors by editing the /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo file.

Also we got some additional help so we now have loads more build hosts! These were provided by Facebook with hosting by Oregon State University Open Source Lab (see cfarm), so thanks to them.

Thanks to David Abdurachmanov and Laurent Guerby for doing all the work (I did nothing).

Run Fedora RISC-V with X11 GUI in your browser

https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=https://bellard.org/jslinux/fedora29-riscv-xwin.cfg&graphic=1&mem=256

Without the GUI is a bit faster: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=https://bellard.org/jslinux/fedora29-riscv-2.cfg&mem=256

Fedora/RISC-V nightly builds

Thanks to David Abdurachmanov for doing the hard work of making Fedora/RISC-V nightly Fedora 29 builds available. To learn how you can boot and play with these in qemu on x86, see this page.

My talk from the RISC-V workshop in Barcelona

“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.

HiFive Unleashed cpuinfo and dmesg

hart	: 1
isa	: rv64imafdc
mmu	: sv39
uarch	: sifive,rocket0

hart	: 2
isa	: rv64imafdc
mmu	: sv39
uarch	: sifive,rocket0

hart	: 3
isa	: rv64imafdc
mmu	: sv39
uarch	: sifive,rocket0

hart	: 4
isa	: rv64imafdc
mmu	: sv39
uarch	: sifive,rocket0

Kernel boot messages after the fold.

HiFive Unleashed booting