Re: booters on real risc-v hardware?

[Nick Hudson <nick.hudson%gmx.co.uk@localhost>]

On 12/05/2024 03:38, T K Spindler (moof) wrote:
> The other day I received a Milk-V Duo 256M SBC; it uses a Sophgo SG2002
> (a C906 core, and a derivative of the CV1800B chip), and uses OpenSBI
> and u-boot (and some other glue) to boot linux on its primary core. (It
> also as a secondary C906, and a ARM A53; not bad for $10 + shipping.)
>
> While linux is all well and good, I'd like to attempt to boot NetBSD on
> it, which begs the question - what booter *should* it be using? Ought it
> to use u-boot (and all that entails), or hook into OpenSBI, or use some
> other methodology?

u-boot is the typical boot loader.

opensbi provide the platform specific firmware services (usable by
u-boot) and OSes - NetBSD requires OpenSBI 1.0 services at this point.

On hardware I've been using u-boot (and the EFI services it has) to load
 bootriscv64.efi, etc. I've not been using u-boot to directly load the
kernel.

Nick