Investigate non-booting Forlinx OKMX8MX-C board (aarch64) by a_faerber

Description

In the context of a SUSE customer inquiry last year, a Forlinx OKMX8MX-C arm64 board had been relayed to me from China that a customer was not successful booting SUSE Linux Micro on. Typically this happens when the vendor's bootloader (e.g., U-Boot) is not configured properly (e.g., U-Boot's distro boot) to be compliant with Arm SystemReady Devicetree (formerly IR) band. Unfortunately I could not immediately get it to emit any output, to even diagnose why it wasn't working. There was no public documentation on the vendor's website to even confirm I was checking the right UARTs.

Earlier this year (2024) I happened to meet the ODM/OEM, Forlinx, at Embedded World 2024 in Nuremberg and again the Monday before Hackweek 24 at Electronica 2024 in Munich. The big puzzle was that the PCB print "OKMX8MX-C" does not match any current Forlinx product, there being OKMX8MM-C and OKMX8MP-C products with the Mini and Plus variants of NXP i.MX 8M family instead. One suggestion from Forlinx staff was to double-check the DIP switches on the board for boot mode selection.

Goals

Double-check the board name and investigate further what may be wrong with this board.

Resources

none

Progress

• The board name is indeed as spelled above, not matching any product on forlinx.net.
• The DIP switches were set to boot from microSD.
• Changing the DIP switches to eMMC boot did result in UART1 RS-232 output! (although at times garbled with the cable supplied and USB adapter used)
• As feared, it did not automatically load our GRUB from USB.
• Booting our GRUB manually from USB (via eMMC U-Boot commands fatload+bootefi) was unsuccessful, with partially Chinese error messages.
• This confirmed the initial suspicion, already shared with Forlinx at Embedded World 2024, that the Forlinx System-on-Module's boot firmware was not Arm SystemReady Devicetree compliant and that a firmware update would be necessary to remedy that.
• The microSD card turned out not to contain a bootable image but to only include Chinese-language board documentation (dated 20220507) and BSP files. They used a diverging name of OKMX8MQ-C.

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FizzBuzz OS by mssola

Project Description

FizzBuzz OS (or just fbos) is an idea I've had in order to better grasp the fundamentals of the low level of a RISC-V machine. In practice, I'd like to build a small Operating System kernel that is able to launch three processes: one that simply prints "Fizz", another that prints "Buzz", and the third which prints "FizzBuzz". These processes are unaware of each other and it's up to the kernel to schedule them by using the timer interrupts as given on openSBI (fizz on % 3 seconds, buzz on % 5 seconds, and fizzbuzz on % 15 seconds).

This kernel provides just one system call, write, which allows any program to pass the string to be written into stdout.

This project is free software and you can find it here.

Goal for this Hackweek

• Better understand the RISC-V SBI interface.
• Better understand RISC-V in privileged mode.
• Have fun.

Resources

• SBI v2.0 ratified specification
• Blog post on SBI
• mssola/fbos

Results

The project was a resounding success Lots of learning, and the initial target was met.

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Tumbleweed on Mars-CM (RISC-V board) by ph03nix

RISC-V is awesome, Tumbleweed is awesome, chocolate cake is awesome. I'm planning to combine all of them in one project.

Project Description

I recently purchased a MILK-V Mars CM and managed to setup it up already using Debian Linux. My project for this Hackweek is to see how far I can get to run Tumbleweed on this compute module board.

Goal for this Hackweek

• Run Tumbleweed on the Compute Module

Resources

• http://milkv.io/mars-cm
• https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:VisionFive2

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Explore Microchip PIC64GX1000 Curiosity board (riscv64) by a_faerber

Description

The Microchip PIC64 family of RISC-V chipsets was announced this summer, with PIC64GX as first subfamily (with SiFive U54 CPU cores, same as Microchip PolarFire). Later families (PIC64-HPSC and PIC64HX) were announced to feature the long-awaited RISC-V Hypervisor Extension.

My pre-ordered PIC64GX1000 Curiosity board arrived the week before Hackweek 24.

Goals

I intend to investigate enabling openSUSE Tumbleweed riscv64 on this new chipset and board.

Resources

• Microchip Curiosity PIC64GX1000 Kit ES

Progress

• Created udev rules for Curiosity board's FTDI based debug UARTs on USB-C - UART B has output from HSS / OpenSBI, UART C has output from U-Boot and kernel
• Modified the image https://download.opensuse.org/ports/riscv/tumbleweed/images/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-RISC-V-JeOS-efi.riscv64-2024.11.10-Build1.13.raw.xz (20241118) with gdisk to prepend a bootloader partition (copying the binary bootloader from the vendor-supplied microSD, ignoring excess partition size) and added the microchip/pic64gx-curiosity-kit.dtb file to the EFI System Partition (again from the vendor-supplied microSD)
• This boots into Tumbleweed! with ttyS1 by default (UART C)

Stretch goals

Investigate also the Microchip PolarFire SoC Discovery board.

Progress

The Microchip PolarFire Icicle board and BeagleV-Fire board had previously already been enabled by Torsten Duwe.

• Additional udev rules needed to be created for its FTDI UART bridge chip.
• The board ships with a "FIR filter" demo pre-flashed, not exposing any bootloader, only some demo output on UART C. The board will need to be flashed with a Microchip reference design for Linux.
• The board has an on-board Flash Pro Express JTAG debugger on USB-C. Proprietary Programming and Debug tools software is available from Microchip to download, requiring an account. This should then be able to flash the .job file.
• An in-progress patchset for OpenOCD is available in Gerrit, not yet in the openSUSE package. Presumably OpenOCD would not support Microchip's .job file format.

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RISC-V emulator in GLSL capable of running Linux by favogt

Description

There are already numerous ways to run Linux and some programs through emulation in a web browser (e.g. x86 and riscv64 on https://bellard.org/jslinux/), but none use WebGL/WebGPU to run the emulation on the GPU.

I already made a PoC of an AArch64 (64-bit Arm) emulator in OpenCL which is unfortunately hindered by a multitude of OpenCL compiler bugs on all platforms (Intel with beignet or the new compute runtime and AMD with Mesa Clover and rusticl). With more widespread and thus less broken GLSL vs. OpenCL and the less complex implementation requirements for RV32 (especially 32bit integers instead of 64bit), that should not be a major problem anymore.

Goals

Write an RISC-V system emulator in GLSL that is capable of booting Linux and run some userspace programs interactively. Ideally it is small enough to work on online test platforms like Shaderoo with a custom texture that contains bootstrap code, kernel and initrd.

Minimum:

riscv32 without FPU (RV32 IMA) and MMU (µClinux), running Linux in M-mode and userspace in U-mode.

Stretch goals:

FPU support, S-Mode support with MMU, SMP. Custom web frontend with more possibilities for I/O (disk image, network?).

Resources

RISC-V ISA Specifications
Shaderoo
OpenGL 4.5 Quick Reference Card

Result as of Hackweek 2024

WebGL turned out to be insufficient, it only supports OpenGL ES 3.0 but imageLoad/imageStore needs ES 3.1. So we switched directions and had to write a native C++ host for the shaders.

As of Hackweek Friday, the kernel attempts to boot and outputs messages, but panics due to missing memory regions.

Since then, some bugs were fixed and enough hardware emulation implemented, so that now Linux boots with framebuffer support and it's possible to log in and run programs!

The repo with a demo video is available at https://github.com/Vogtinator/risky-v

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Investigate Milk-V Jupiter board (riscv64) by a_faerber

Description

On Monday of Hackweek 24 we received two Milk-V Jupiter mini-ITX boards (JUPITER_V1.1) via the RISC-V International devboards program. The Jupiter board uses a Spacemit M1 System-on-Chip (SoC).

The Banana Pi BPI-F3 board with related Spacemit K1 SoC had previously already been investigated by Marvin Friedrich.

Goals

Investigate the hardware, any shipping boot firmware and its ability to boot openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Resources

• Milk-V Jupiter product page
• Milk-V Jupiter docs

Progress

• On Monday Andreas purchased an ATX power supply, to power up the board.
• According to UART output (note there's two UART pinouts on the board), there appears to be an undocumented U-Boot bootloader in QSPI, in addition to the documented microSD, NVMe and eMMC boot methods.
• The on-board bootloader does not seem to support USB ("No working controllers found").
• Manually loading our GRUB from microSD (via load+bootefi commands from SPI-based U-Boot) works, but in GRUB loading our kernel fails ("error: ../../grub-core/loader/efi/linux.c:521:out of memory.").
• Marvin instead had success flashing a ready-made Bianbu OS image via titantools to microSD card (i.e., a different U-Boot on microSD), that he then modified to load openSUSE kernels instead.

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YQPkg - Bringing the Single Package Selection Back to Life by shundhammer

tl;dr

Rip out the high-level YQPackageSelector widget from YaST and make it a standalone Qt program without any YaST dependencies.

See section "Result" at the bottom for the current status after the hack week.

Current Status

See the development status issue at the GitHub repo.

tl;dr: It's usable now with all the key features.

It does real package installation / removal / update with reasonable user feedback.

The Past and the Present

We used to have and still have a powerful software selection with the YaST sw_single module (and the YaST patterns counterpart): You can select software down to the package level, you can easily select one of many available package versions, you can select entire patterns - or just view them and pick individual packages from patterns.

You can search packages based on name, description, "requires" or "provides" level, and many more things.

The Future

YaST is on its way out, to be replaced by the new Agama installer and Cockpit for system administration. Those tools can do many things, but fine-grained package selection is not among them. And there are also no other Open Source tools available for that purpose that even come close to the YaST package selection.

Many aspects of YaST have become obsolete over the years; many subsystems now come with a good default configuration, or they can configure themselves automatically. Just think about sound or X11 configuration; when did you last need to touch them?

For others, the desktops bring their own tools (e.g. printers), or there are FOSS configuration tools (NetworkManager, BlueMan). Most YaST modules are no longer needed, and for many others there is a replacement in tools like Cockpit.

But no longer having a powerful fine-grained package selection like in YaST sw_single will hurt. Big time. At least until there is an adequate replacement, many users will want to keep it.

The Idea

YaST sw_single always revolved around a powerful high-level widget on the abstract UI level. Libyui has low-level widgets like YPushButton, YCheckBox, YInputField, more advanced ones like YTable, YTree; and some few very high-level ones like YPackageSelector and YPatternSelector that do the whole package selection thing alone, working just on the libzypp level and changing the status of packages or patterns there.

For the YaST Qt UI, the YQPackageSelector / YQPatternSelector widgets work purely on the Qt and libzypp level; no other YaST infrastructure involved, in particular no Ruby (or formerly YCP) interpreter, no libyui-level widgets, no bindings between Qt / C++ and Ruby / YaST-core, nothing. So it's not too hard to rip all that part out of YaST and create a standalone program from it.

For the NCurses UI, the NCPackageSelector / NCPatternSelector create a lot of libyui widgets (inheriting YWidget / NCWidget) and use a lot of libyui calls to glue them together; and all that of course still needs a lot of YaST / libyui / libyui-ncurses infrastructure. So NCurses is out of scope here.

Preparatory Work: Initializing the Package Subsystem

To see if this is feasible at all, the existing UI examples needed some fixing to check what is needed on that level. That was the make-or-break decision: Would it be realistically possible to set the needed environment in libzypp up (without being stranded in the middle of that task alone at the end of the hack week)?

Yes, it is: That part is already working:

https://github.com/yast/yast-ycp-ui-bindings/pull/71

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Enlightenment in Leap 16 by simotek

Description

Get the Enlightenment stack + X11 building and running on the Leap 16 codebase.

Goals

• Get enlightenment / terminology compiling for Leap 16
• Test that they are running correctly in a Virtual Machine.

Resources

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Update Haskell ecosystem in Tumbleweed to GHC-9.10.x by psimons

Description

We are currently at GHC-9.8.x, which a bit old. So I'd like to take a shot at the latest version of the compiler, GHC-9.10.x. This is gonna be interesting because the new version requires major updates to all kinds of libraries and base packages, which typically means patching lots of packages to make them build again.

Goals

Have working builds of GHC-9.10.x and the required Haskell packages in 'devel:languages:haskell` so that we can compile:

• git-annex
• pandoc
• xmonad
• cabal-install

Resources

• https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/devel:languages:haskell/
• https://github.com/opensuse-haskell/configuration/
• #discuss-haskell
• https://www.twitch.tv/peti343

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New openSUSE-welcome by lkocman

Project Description

Let's revisit our existing openSUSE welcome app.

My goal was to show Leap 16 in a new coat. Welcome app adds to the first time use experience. We've recently added donation button to our existing welcome.

Some things that I recently wanted to address were EOL and possibly upgrade notification.

I've already done some experiments with mint welcome app, but not sure if it's better than the existing one.

There is also a PR to rework existing app https://github.com/openSUSE/openSUSE-welcome/pull/36 (this should be considered as an option too)

Goal for this Hackweek

New welcome app, possibly with EOL notification for Leap.

1) Welcome application(s) with (rebrand changes) maintained under github.com/openSUSE

2) Application is submitted to openSUSE:Factory && openSUSE:Leap:16.0

3) Updated needles in openQA (probably post hackweek)

Resources

Reddit discussion about the best welcome app out there.

Github repo for the current welcome app.

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New migration tool for Leap by lkocman

Update

I will call a meeting with other interested people at 11:00 CET https://meet.opensuse.org/migrationtool

Description

SLES 16 plans to have no yast tool in it. Leap 16 might keep some bits, however, we need a new tool for Leap to SLES migration, as this was previously handled by a yast2-migration-sle

Goals

A tool able to migrate Leap 16 to SLES 16, I would like to cover also other scenarios within openSUSE, as in many cases users would have to edit repository files manually.

• Leap -> Leap n+1 (minor and major version updates)
• Leap -> SLES docs
• Leap -> Tumbleweed
• Leap -> Slowroll
• Leap Micro -> Leap Micro n+1 (minor and major version updates)
• Leap Micro -> MicroOS

Hackweek 24 update

Marcela and I were working on the project from Brno coworking as well as finalizing pieces after the hackweek. We've tested several migration scenarios and it works. But it needs further polishing and testing.

Projected was renamed to opensuse-migration-tool and was submitted to devel project https://build.opensuse.org/requests/1227281

Repository

https://github.com/openSUSE/opensuse-migration-tool

Out of scope is any migration to an immutable system. I know Richard already has some tool for that.

Resources

Tracker for yast stack reduction code-o-o/leap/features#173 YaST stack reduction

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