RISC-V support

[Karsten Merker]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2019 at 02:52:33PM +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote:

> It would be nice to have some riscv setup for our buildbot.  Do
> you happen to have recommendations for something like that? 
> Any distro that gets regular toolchain updates?

Hello,

the Debian riscv64 port is based on the Debian "unstable" suite
(i.e. Debian's development branch), so it usually follows
upstream's toolchain development rather closely.  Things will
slow down a bit during the next months, though, as Debian will
enter the staged freeze for the next stable release.

Debian doesn't have ready-made system images for riscv64 right
now.  Our plan is to provide a regular Debian-Installer image
for riscv64, but one of the last big blockers for that are
exactly the elfutils issues that Jim is trying to address in
this thread :-).

If you have access to a Debian/unstable system somewhere,
setting up a Debian-based riscv64 VM can be done rather easily. 
There is a step-by-step documentation in the Debian Wiki at

  https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V#Setting_up_a_riscv64_virtual_machine

If you should happen to have further questions, feel free to
contact me.

> Is a libvirt/qemu setup reliable enough or would you recommend
> trying to get real hardware?

Qemu works quite well (both user-mode as well as full-system
emulation).  Debian currently runs a large number of riscv64
package builders in qemu-system instances and they have shown
to be very reliable.

Regards,
Karsten
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