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.