On Sat, May 01, 2021 at 06:14:14AM +0200, Bengt Richter wrote: > Could some riscv-model-version.scm be written to use qemu to create > an exact virtual metal RISC-V board (of the kind being sampled, for starters) > for use on our laptops and PCs? > > I think that might get more people involved, and would ideally produce > images that would "just work" on the bare metal boards. > > Maybe guix could become a preferred RISC-V development environment :) > > Thoughts?
QEMU supports RISC-V and boots. Currently there are some Linux development images floating around. A port should be possible. But I think that real hardware is a major incentive. Besides industry may pick up interest in our work (offering free boards shows they want more development) if it runs on actual hardware. GNU Mes was ported by Danny to arm64, so the port should not be too hard and Jan and colleagues are happy to help. One can even apply for a grant at NLNet that pays for a year of work: https://nlnet.nl/news/2021/20210401-call.html Note that GNU Mes kicked off with such a grant, as well as the arm port. We are happy to help with writing the grant too. RISC-V is very exciting and will be performant. It is small, runs cooler and therefore many more independent cores fit on the dye. Think GPU without the disadvantages. Next to IoP RISC-V will power desktops and perhaps supercomputers. Pj.
