The RISC-V Summit North America will be hosted from November 6th to 8th, 2023. StarFive has two topics accepted by the summit, which are:
- Insight of Linux Distro Optimization for RISC-V: Using VisionFive 2 Debian as Example
- Introducing RISC-V Platform Management Interface (RPMI)
In this summit, StarFive is one of the four organizations from mainland China that have topics accepted: StarFive (2 topics), T-Head/Alibaba (3 topics), Terapines (1 topic), RIOS lab/Tsinghua University (1 topic).
The following is the overview of the speeches:
1. Insight of Linux Distro Optimization for RISC-V: Using VisionFive 2 Debian as Example
To facilitate the broader adoption of the RISC-V platform across various applications, Linux distribution plays a crucial role in reducing entry barriers for users and developers. Linux distro provides a familiar environment and toolset, enabling developers to easily begin their RISC-V journey and encouraging the development of software for this platform. In this topic, we discuss Debian distro enablement on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 platform, and optimization from a distro perspective, including GPU, codec, and crypto block. Our initial focus was on showcasing working applications such as LibreOffice and Firefox, with the goal of proving the required middleware and software packages work well for the RISC-V platform. Swiftly after that, a lot of effort has been poured into optimization after the discovery of obvious performance gaps when compared with other platforms like ARM which has similar hardware performance. Hence this sharing will share some of the findings and optimization we have done to date. Hope this sharing will foster more collaboration and exchange of ideas within the RISC-V software community in fuelling the software ecosystem from a performance perspective.
2. Introducing RISC-V Platform Management Interface (RPMI)
Modern SoCs have moved from single application processor systems to multi-core homogeneous and heterogeneous application processors. This trend has led to having one or more management controllers in the SoC which provide the application processors targets for offloading system management, power management, and control tasks. This evolution has necessitated the use of standardized interfaces for seamless communication between the different processors/components within the SoC. The RISC-V Platform Management Interface (RPMI) is a new specification that defines message-based communication between application processors and management controllers. The RPMI specification describes both the messaging protocol and its messaging transports, where the protocol is independent of the transports. This talk presents a high-level overview of the upcoming RPMI specification and a demonstration of an RPMI implementation in QEMU, OpenSBI, and Linux.
