Reassess HiFive Premier P550 board (for RISC-V virtualization)
an invention by a_faerber
Updated about 6 hours ago. 1 hackers ♥️. 2 followers.

Description

With growing interest in the RISC-V instruction set architecture, we need to re-evaluate ways of building packages for it:

Currently openSUSE OBS is using x86_64 build workers, using QEMU userspace-level (syscall) emulation inside KVM VMs. Occasionally this setup causes build failures, due to timing differences or incomplete emulation. Andreas Schwab and others have collected workarounds in projects like openSUSE:Factory:RISCV to deal with some of those issues.

Ideally we would be using native riscv64 KVM VMs instead. This requires CPUs with the H extension. Two generally available development boards feature the ESWIN 7700X System-on-Chip with SiFive P550 CPUs, HiFive Premier P550 and Milk-V Megrez. We've had access to the HiFive Premier P550 for some time now, but the early version (based on Yocto) had issues with the bootloader, and reportedly later boards were booting to a dracut emergency shell for lack of block device drivers.

Goals

  • Update the boot firmware
  • Test whether and how far openSUSE Tumbleweed boots

Results

  • Boot firmware image 2025.11.00 successfully flashed onto board
    • Enables UEFI boot in U-Boot by default
    • U-Boot's embedded Flat Device Tree is lacking a timebase-frequency, required for recent (6.16.3) mainline kernels (panic leading to reset, visible via earlycon=sbi)
  • Tested eswin/eic7700-hifive-premier-p550.dtb from Ubuntu 2025.11.00 image
    • Allows to boot past the above panic, but times out in JeOS image while waiting for block device, dropping to dracut emergency shell
    • No devices shown in lsblk -- 6.16 appears to be lacking device drivers still

Resources

Looking for hackers with the skills:

risc-v kvm virtualization

This project is part of:

Hack Week 25

Activity

  • about 6 hours ago: drdavis liked this project.
  • about 7 hours ago: a_faerber added keyword "risc-v" to this project.
  • about 7 hours ago: a_faerber added keyword "kvm" to this project.
  • about 7 hours ago: a_faerber added keyword "virtualization" to this project.
  • about 7 hours ago: a_faerber started this project.
  • about 7 hours ago: a_faerber originated this project.


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