IPFire on RISC-V: Looking for hardware expertise

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

Hi all,

I have been running IPFire on riscv64 in a virtual machine for a while now, and it is boring in the best possible way. It installs, it boots, the web interface works, firewall, IPsec, WireGuard, Suricata and Pakfire all do what they are supposed to. I have not found a single bug that was caused by the architecture.

I did not expect that as porting IPFire to ARM way rather painful.

The problem is that a VM is an idealised machine. It has no firmware worth speaking of, no real network cards, no storage controllers and so on. Every part of a system that usually causes trouble is the part we have not touched.

So I am looking for people who know RISC-V hardware and want to work on this with us. The things that need doing:

  * Getting our installer to boot on real firmware using UEFI
  * Validate our kernel configuration and drivers for network hardware
  * Finding out what throughput looks like once traffic goes through real interfaces

I intend to only support UEFI-enabled systems. One image for everything, no per-board images, no vendor boot scripts, no device trees to maintain. If your system boots a Debian or Fedora image, IPFire should boot too.

Anything you can test is useful, but where I would like this to end up is on hardware you would trust to route traffic for years without touching it. That class of RISC-V machine is only starting to appear, and I would like us to be ready when it does.

If you want to get involved, nightly builds are available here:

  https://nightly.ipfire.org/next/latest/riscv64/

Please report any problems directly to bugzilla.ipfire.org <http://bugzilla.ipfire.org/> and post your experience right here.

Best,
-Michael