RISC-V software ecosystem in 2020

on YouTube ↗24m

" summary

Toolchain is mostly upstream: GCC and LLVM support RISC-V, but 32-bit glibc is still being finished; Rust and Go land, Java and JS engines are missing. QEMU mainline runs since ~2.0 and Linux boots from 4.19; distros build ~90% of packages. Firmware stack uses OpenSBI for SBI services, U-Boot/GRUB/EFI work but secure boot is absent. The kernel adds no MMU support (merged around 5.5) and boots Linux on tiny boards — a $5–$40 Kendryte board runs BusyBox with ~8 MB SRAM while HiFive Unleashed is a $1,000 Linux-capable platform.

AI-written summary · about

" chapters (11)

1. 0:00Western Digital
2. 0:49Software Ecosystem Overview Linux kernel, RTOS, QEMU, Applications, Toolchain
3. 2:22Linux Ecosystem: Status At-a-glance Fast progress but more work needed
4. 3:49Toolchain: Compilers and Core Libraries Compilers OK, libraries need work
5. 7:28RISC-V Boot Flow Follows commonly used multiple boot stages model
6. 8:58OpenSBI open-source implementation of SBI specifications
7. 11:43Boot Loaders
8. 13:04Linux kernel Support added with kernel 4.15
9. 13:58Hypervisors Type-1/Type-2 hypervisor support available on RISC-V
10. 15:44Linux Distributions Fedora, Debian and OpenSuse are very active Fedora: stage 4 disk images released
11. 16:47Non-Linux distributions Slow progress

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