[Meta Project] Porting Firefox, Chromium/ChromiumOS to RV64GC, and the 2K RISC-V Laptop Proect

[Wei Wu (吴伟)]

Hi all,

We, the PLCT Lab and Tarsier Team[1], are about to start two projects
on July 1, 2021:
1. Porting Firefox to RV64GC, including spidermonkey w/ JIT support.
2. Porting Chromium browser and ChromiumOS to RV64GC.

All the roadmaps, development meetings, CI/BuildFarm, source codes and
issue trackers will be open in July. All the codes will be submitted
to upstreams eventually.

The motivation and necessity behind these projects is that we expect
there will be RISC-V laptops coming out next year. The ISCAS is
seeking to build 2000 RV64GC laptops before the end of 2022. I am
focusing on the software side. There are still a few 'big absence' in
the RISC-V software ecosystem which should be supported when the
hardwares is ready. The availability of mainstream browsers is
currently the highest demand we heard.

Collaborations are welcome! Feel free to name the 'big absence' in the
RISC-V software ecosystem so that we can do some porting work with
priority.

[1] Tarsier Team is a new team in ISCAS, which is focusing on porting
and optimizing Linux distributions for RISC-V.


--
Best wishes,
Wei Wu (吴伟)

[Andreas Schwab]

I have done some preliminary porting of chromium, see
<https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/openSUSE:Factory:RISCV/chromium>.

Andreas.

--
Andreas Schwab, SUSE Labs, sch...@suse.de
GPG Key fingerprint = 0196 BAD8 1CE9 1970 F4BE 1748 E4D4 88E3 0EEA B9D7
"And now for something completely different."

[Wei Wu (吴伟)]

Thanks! I'll check it out.

I see several patches are already in the list. Is there any blogs or
wiki page describing the current status & progress?

[Andreas Schwab]

On Jun 07 2021, Wei Wu (吴伟) wrote:

> Thanks! I'll check it out.
>
> I see several patches are already in the list. Is there any blogs or
> wiki page describing the current status & progress?

The interesting patch is riscv.patch.

[Wei Wu (吴伟)]

Hi all,

After talking with Han Mao (the chair of Android SIG) we realized that
there are lots of common open source components in Android and
ChromiumOS/Chromium porting efforts. Han Mao would like to help us
putting the porting & optimizing of common parts under Android SIG.

[Wei Wu (吴伟)]

Hi all,

I'm very excited to share the news with you: Yuning Liang from
XCaliByte claimed that his team had already done the RV64GC porting
for Chromium Browser and will open source their work before the end of
this month!

This is a really big progress in the RISC-V ecosystem. The only
not-perfect point is that it was a bit too late to disclose their hard
work :)

Thank Yuning and his team again for promising open source!

[lazyp...@gmail.com]

So I believe that the meta project has just reached its first
milestone: Firefox[1] and Chromium[2] can run on the riscv64 boards
now. (to be clear, these success were not driven by me or the PLCT
Lab. Lots of amateurs and developers from different communities made

these happen. Really amazing!)

And this is just the beginning. From now on, I believe the speed of
development will be significantly accelerated.

I've created a public repo[3]  for tracking the progress and blocks for all software that may run on RISC-V laptops. Feel free to drop your favorite open software here:

[3] https://github.com/plctlab/riscv-laptop/issues

All comments/issues are welcome!

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/g/sw-dev/c/81caeTrQWLs
[2] https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/g/sw-dev/c/PCGVIH2dDJg