Interestingly, they suddenly got a lot of criticism for not having free source code for all hardware initialization earlier this year. On one of the threads on this issue we discussed this here, but I forget which one. That is, that even if the ISA is completely open and can be audited (no hardware backdoors for example), many computers and "dev boards" depend on some proprietary, non-free low level hardware initialization software. This is why the raspberry pi is considered "severely flawed" by the FSF (it cannot boot without a blob). It turns out Sifive had a similar problem. Here is the post by Coreboot dev Ron Minnich where he compares it to any ARM board because
https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/cor ... 86977.htmlI wasn't surprised by this. However, what did surprise me was that shortly after this they managed some how to make (at least some part) of the code open source.
Micheal Larabel writes:
The code for initializing the DDR controller was not open-source and SiFive believed they could not open-source it. The good news is that SiFive has discovered they will be able to open-source it.
They have since then put the bootloader code here:
https://github.com/sifive/freedom-u540-c000-bootloaderSo, AFAIK this is the only computer that you can buy and boot with 100% open source code and also have a publically descried instruction set architecture so that you could in theory make the processor your self at home (if that was really something you wanted to do). They still use "closed hardware" parts on the board (like ethernet) but the code appears to be open. The price is a bit steep though. (1000 USD, even though the performance and the 8 GB RAM are on another level compared to most other ARM boards. OK, there is also POWER, but those cost 10x more and probably have all the same problems if not more.
Here are some news from the Debian port
2018-09-13
A fix for the broken initrd handling in the Linux kernel has been committed to the upstream kernel git repository and will be part of the 4.19rc4 release. First versions of a patchset to support the qemu RISC-V "virt" board in u-boot have been posted to the upstream u-boot development list.
2018-08-21
The last driver bits required for booting the mainline kernel to userland on a qemu "virt" machine have been merged during the Linux 4.19 merge window. It is now possible to build a working kernel directly from upstream git without any additional patches. Please note that this currently only works for a "static" kernel, i.e. without initrd. Initrd support requires an additional patch that is planned to go upstream later in the 4.19 development cycle.
2018-08-04
Debian 9.5 has been released on 2018-07-14 and dak now accepts packages with riscv64 in their control file. As a result, a number of essential packages have been moved from the "unreleased" to the "unstable" suite and it is now possible to use debootstrap to create a "minbase" riscv64 chroot.
https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V