Re: RISCV porting effort

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> skribis:

> On Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 03:43:44PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

[...]

>> If the HiFive works fine, let me remind you that we have budget to buy
>> hardware, so we could just as well order a couple of these right away
>> (maybe you’ll have Guix System running by the time we receive them ;-)).
>
> On one hand they seem similar to some of our aarch64 boards (but with
> 16GB of RAM), on the other hand it'd be a coup to announce serious
> support for the platform so quickly.

I’m not saying we should announce anything, but rather that we get ready
for when the port is functional (especially if there’s typically 6
months between ordering and shipping).

> I had to pay import tax when I received mine, and I assume those in
> Europe did too, so I'd recommend they be hosted in the US since IIRC
> they're shipping from Texas. It might be nice to wait until we have it
> working for sure, but the lead time is still expected to be 6 months
> between ordering and shipping dates.

OK.  I don’t doubt “working for sure” will eventually happen; I wouldn’t
be surprised if it takes less than 6 months even.  :-)

(I’m not talking about the reduced bootstrap seeds, just the gross
bootstrap as currently done on ARM.)

> I suppose if something else comes along that's faster we could always
> cancel an order and switch to that.
>
> I have mine sitting in a mini-ITX case, using a libre-respecting NVIDIA
> card. Definitely a more serious board than the aarch64 boards I've
> bought in the past.

Good!

Ludo’.