DevBoards Program Meeting August 15, 2024

[Greg Sterling]

All,

Our next meeting will be tomorrow, August 15, 2024 at 14:00 UTC.  Local times:

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

Here's the meeting link to copy to your calendar:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/r/eventedit/copy/MnRoZWRxcW9vNjg2MXQxcHZlNnVla3Eza2lfMjAyNDA4MTVUMTUwMDAwWiB0ZWNoLm1lZXRpbmdzQHJpc2N2Lm9yZw

The agenda will focus on standard topics:

• Program updates from RISC-V
• Board and Project updates
• Future Board Program Discussion
• 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.

Greg Sterling (RISC-V International)

[Greg Sterling]

Thanks all for another product and engaging meeting!  Below are the minutes from the meeting. 

I look forward to seeing you all at the next call!

Greg Sterling (RISC-V International)

Meeting - August 15, 2024

Attendees: Greg, Saurabh, Darren, Lance, Carl, Yu Bo, Pratik, Daniel, Andreas, Kanak, Alex

Board Updates:

• SiFive

• Extended the reduced price ($299) for unmatched, have over 100 boards that are still available.

• StarFive

• China summit is in two weeks, that we will be able to talk about next…

• Allwinner

• China summit is in two weeks, that we will be able to talk about next…

• SpacemiT

• China summit is in two weeks, that we will be able to talk about next…

• Microchip

• Partnership with Canonical announced, PIC64GX

• Basically SiFive Unmatched, as a microcontroller

• Does have an MMU, U74 Cores

Program Updates:

• Arch Linux

• link

• OpenEuler

• link 

• Debian

• Some riscv64 hardware was displayed and bring one short talk on debconf24

• Slide deck  has updates listed for RevyOS, useful for getting Debian up and running

• SUSE

• Working on openSUSE image for PolarFire Icicle board

• Q: Is there an overview of images?

• Board-centric Hardware Compatibility Library (HCL) Wiki, cf. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:RISC-V and https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:RISC-V as starting points, https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/openSUSE:Factory:RISCV for package and image builds

• Additionally some “Contrib” projects per board/vendor when downstream packages are still needed

• Oreboot

• Full DRAM init + training on SpacemiT K1x done / works

• Tested on 4GB BPi-F3 and 16GB MuseBook

• https://gist.github.com/orangecms/8624aa82bab4931f787b5eee572f7668 

• Also managed to flash to eMMC without vendor tool, just plain fastboot

• Resulting binary is 35K vs vendor blob for training alone being 20K and fully copied at runtime, pre-allocated, so taking 40K alone

• Firmware

• Daniel forked a Rust implementation of fastboot that can be used as a library

• https://github.com/platform-system-interface/fastboot 

• Ironing out a few things, works for SpacemiT K1x and TH1520 🥳

• RISC-V

• Milk-V Jupiter - delivering a mini itx board, has anybody considered if there might be rackmountable or other platforms for delivering these boards into labs or other consistent/managed environments?

• PiKVM and/or NanoKVM may be good fits here

• There are large-ish rackmount systems that can hold 8-9 MiniITX/ATX systems in “sleds” but these are just sheet metal and have no management

• Some examples of dual mini-itx in 1U/2U rackmount

• https://www.amazon.com/Circotech-RM-2270-Rackmount-Mini-ITX-Motherboard/dp/B06Y5JT3N9

• https://portwell.com/products/detail.php?CUSTCHAR1=POMA-T1220 

• Using nano PSU systems would also be a good fit because these boards as so low power: https://streacom.com/products/nano90-fanless-psu/ (there are many alternatives like https://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-90 )

• Linux Kernel

• TH1520 clock controller support now in linux-next 🐧

• TH1520 SPI node added for both beaglev-ahead and licheepi 4a

What’s cool?:

• SiFive Introduces Performance P870-D for Datacenter/AI applications - link

• Raspberry Pi Pico2 powered by the RP2350 MCU RISC-V Hazard 3 cores - link

• https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3 

• https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-2-our-new-5-microcontroller-board-on-sale-now/ 

• Canonical adds new PIC64GX to supported RISC-V platforms - link

• Tenstorrent Continuing to Contribute to RISC-V OS Ecosystem - link

• Bare metal hello world for RISC-V https://github.com/orangecms/hello-risc-v 

• Supports TH1520 for a start