DevBoards Program Meeting May 2, 2024

[Jeff Scheel]

All,

Sorry for the short notice, but our next meeting will be tomorrow, May 2, 2024 at 12:00 UTC.  Local times:

• 8 PM China
• 5:30 PM India Standard Time
• 2 PM Central European Summer Time
• 8 AM Eastern U.S. Daylight Time
• 7 AM Pacific U.S. Daylight Time

Here's the meeting link to copy to your calendar:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=MzV2cDA2YW5wM21ra2YwbDkyNXVoOWdjbzlfMjAyNDA1MDJUMTIwMDAwWiB0ZWNoLm1lZXRpbmdzQHJpc2N2Lm9yZw&tmsrc=tech.meetings%40riscv.org

The agenda will focus on standard topics:

• Program updates from RISC-V
• Board and Project updates
• Future Board Program Discussion
• RISC-V GPU Status Discussion (Carl)
• What's cool? (time permitting)
  

Any topics, updates, or information can as always either be raised at the beginning of the meeting or by adding it to our agenda document, Dev Board Group Minutes.
-Jeff

--

Jeff Scheel (he/him/his)

Director of Technical Programs, RISC-V International

[Jeff Scheel]

Oops, copy paste error.  The Pacific time for the meeting is indeed 5:00 AM.  Lance, please do not feel compelled to attend.

Sorry for any confusion.

-Jeff

--

Jeff Scheel (he/him/his)

Director of Technical Programs, RISC-V International

[Daniel Maslowski]

I will see if I can join later, have a colliding work meeting.

Left my notes in the doc, got a lot done. :) 

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to devboards-prog...@riscv.org.

[Greg Sterling]

Welcome to our new and newer members today.  I hope you'll come back and join us again in the future.

As we have discussed, we will continue to include minutes and chat history from the meeting in our shared Meeting Document. 

Thanks everyone, and see you at the next meeting!

Greg Sterling (RISC-V International)

Attendees: Greg, Emil, Yu Bo, Wei, Jeff, Isaac, Leon, Victor, Han, Idan, Felix, Daniel

Board Updates:

• DC ROMA

• Jeff has a few laptops and would be happy to work with someone interested in GPU or desktop enablement.  Please reach out to Jeff if interested.

Program Updates:

• Arch Linux

• Arch Linux Ports RFC enters the final comment period. Looking forward to finally starting the RFC process for adding riscv64 as the first port.

• Thousands of package updates like before, including

1. LibreOffice 24.x

2. Electron 29.x, 30.x

3. Chromium 123.x

4. Firefox 125.x

5. Linux kernel 6.8.x

6. …

• Demo run on LicheeRV Nano (SG2002): https://twitter.com/felixonmars/status/1778464638407184766

• Working on Python 3.12 rebuild at the moment. We are late to the party already.

• Debian

•  One Licheepi Cluster4A (in PLCT labs) was prepared for Debci.

• Canonical

• Release 24.04 and upgraded RISC-V images.  Also upstreaming patches for future boards.

• R9

• Understood virtual memory a bit better now, can’t follow the same model across architectures; we will find a workaround, community has ideas

• oreboot

• Based on a hint, figured that there is indeed source code for DRAM init for the Milk-V Duo boards / SoCs, just not in the main branch; see https://github.com/sophgo/fsbl/tree/sg200x-dev created 2 months ago

• Hello world running on CV1800B and SG200x (Duo, Duo S, Duo 256M)

• Figured out that the USB pogo pins on the Duo IO board is routed to a USB hub that collides with the mask ROM’s loader mode; put tape on the pads of the Duo

• Got DRAM init ported for the Duo S (SG2000), including BIST

• Duo S is a neat portable development environment https://mastodon.social/@CyReVolt/112343440282307938 

• Firmware

• Daniel built a tool to load firmware to SRAM on CV1800B/SG200x https://github.com/orangecms/sg_boot based on the provided tool, but can be used separately; others have used it successfully

1. https://github.com/milkv-duo/duo-buildroot-sdk/issues/8 

• SpacemiT/Banana Pi have dropped first code dumps for the K1x https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/pi-u-boot/tree/v2022.10-k1

1. DRAM init is currently mostly a blob (20K in size; see https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/pi-u-boot/blob/v2022.10-k1/drivers/ddr/spacemit/k1x/lpddr4_silicon_init.c + https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/pi-u-boot/blob/v2022.10-k1/drivers/ddr/spacemit/k1x/ddr_init_asic.h ); asked in Slack if someone could help getting sources

• RISC-V

• Board Delivery Status 

1. Kendryte K230 (7x shipped, 1x to ship along)

2. Lichee Pi Cluster (Lance should have this)

3. Additional Lichee Pi 4As starting to ship

• Allocated RTOS

• Allocated to Squid Web Cache

4. Additional VisionFive Boards

• Allocated to Rocky Linux

What’s cool?:

•  https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/samsung-electronics-to-open-rd-lab-in-silicon-valley-to-develop-risc-v-ai-chips/ - Samsung opening lab in U.S. to develop RISC-V chips

• Limited number of BPI-F3 boards available: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806729832678.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2usa4itemAdapt (Datasheet: https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/SpacemiT_K1_datasheet )

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p7l99s5__r3DI9LK27Z9WwwCqOge3xA-/view?usp=sharing - Announcement information from new company in China (SpacemiT).  Projected to have vector 1.0 but no hypervisor.

Miscellaneous notes:

1. Future Boards Program Discussion (Suggested Program Questions)

• Are there specific hardware features that you currently need to get started? 

• Does your lab require a specific board size or feature, or is there flexibility based on what boards are available?

• Will your work support mixed RISC-V devices, or do you need a homogenous deployment?

• What is the minimum number of devices that you need to get started, and what can you do with a limited number of devices?

• What is the optimal number of devices that you need to complete your work, and what can you do with the full number of devices?