| 9 Mar 2026 |
 dramforever | tbh i don't like how Yuning Liang is apparently becoming the face in the riscv community for other people's contributions | 05:06:31 |
| dramforever | and/or undeliverable promises | 05:08:14 |
| 11 Mar 2026 |
 JamieMagee | I'm not sure if there are long-term plans for RISC-V builders on hydra, but I found some notes from a Fedora maintainer working on their RISC-V port:
https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2026/03/10/risc-v-is-sloooow/ | 00:24:22 |
 hexa | once beefy rv23a hit | 00:24:48 |
| hexa | we have an offer for acces to Spacemit K3 hardware too | 00:26:24 |
| hexa | * we have an offer for access to Spacemit K3 hardware too | 00:26:28 |
| hexa | I have just doubts its worth it | 00:26:32 |
| dramforever | hydra.nixos.org no, unofficial native riscv hydra running less frequent evals is starting to become viable | 00:30:01 |
| dramforever | also beefy is good for perf, rva23 ... it's limited | 00:30:34 |
| dramforever | notthe most representative but on reddit on coremark they got -30% perf improvement adding vectors on k3. yes that's negative thirty percent, a downgrade | 00:31:57 |
| JamieMagee | That sounds somewhat promising. | 00:34:45 |
| JamieMagee | I tried running hydra using QEMU for RISC-V support, and ran headfirst into: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/460825#issuecomment-3994959331
TL;DR RISC-V bootstrap binutils is predates support for zca, while GCC 15 now implies support for zca :/ | 00:39:27 |
| dramforever | that's an unrelated failure | 00:45:37 |
| dramforever | if convenient can you open a new issue for that? thanks | 00:46:01 |
| JamieMagee | dramforever: I opened https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/498689 | 01:01:39 |
| JamieMagee | I was going to wait for the bootstrap overhaul, but who knows how long that will take to land. So this should resolve the issue for now: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/498702 | 02:13:47 |
| 12 Mar 2026 |
 Alister Galpin | Does anyone have an example of the minimum needed to get nix onto a device with uboot was just thinking about it and a lot of the previous pain I had was compiling, so thinking I should just get it booting and able to build/switch | 07:01:31 |
| dramforever | nixos? or just nix | 07:02:14 |
| Alister Galpin | Nixos | 07:02:27 |
| dramforever | also we don't really have prebuilt stuff for riscv so maybe it's not going to be much less pain | 07:02:36 |
| Alister Galpin | True, but might make the iterations faster, last attempt took 2 days of compiling 😅 | 07:03:42 |
| Alister Galpin | And then the image didn't boot ran out of time and now that's 6 months ago at least | 07:04:47 |
| 13 Mar 2026 |
|  eljamm joined the room. | 10:30:39 |
| eljamm | Hello, can someone please help test this program? the executable seems to be working, but I have no clue how to test the module. | 10:34:42 |
 Alex | In reply to @eljamm:matrix.org
Hello, can someone please help test this program? the executable seems to be working, but I have no clue how to test the module. It's not 100% reliable, but you can try in qEMU.
Otherwise, for the most reliable results, you will need to wait a few days for someone to do a full native build of your branch. | 18:05:40 |
| 16 Mar 2026 |
| eljamm | Thanks, I'm looking into doing this right now with this NixOS test. Things are a bit cursed, because I had to enable binfmt for riscv64-linux in my system to get the test to even start, but inside that I'm also supposed to test Linux emulation for RISC-V 😅
Now, the test is just hanging here:
machine: Guest root shell did not produce any data yet...
machine: To debug, enter the VM and run 'systemctl status backdoor.service'.
machine: Guest root shell did not produce any data yet...
machine: To debug, enter the VM and run 'systemctl status backdoor.service'.
| 12:44:05 |
| eljamm | * Thanks, I'm looking into doing this right now with this NixOS test. Things are a bit cursed, because I had to enable binfmt for riscv64-linux in my system to get the test to even start, but inside that I'm also supposed to test Linux emulation for RISC-V 😅
This said, the test is just hanging here:
machine: Guest root shell did not produce any data yet...
machine: To debug, enter the VM and run 'systemctl status backdoor.service'.
machine: Guest root shell did not produce any data yet...
machine: To debug, enter the VM and run 'systemctl status backdoor.service'.
| 12:44:47 |
| dramforever | oh, dear... | 15:53:26 |
| Alex | That's not a good sign.
The backdoor service that the test driver uses to control the VM is not printing the sentinel value that the test driver recognises as "VM is ready". There are a number of ways for this to go wrong, none of which are easy to identify without logs.
It might not be writing system logs to a visible location.
Can you try adding this to the VM's system configuration?
boot.kernelParams = [ "console=ttyS0" "console=hvc0" ];
One of these console options might allow you to see kernel and early userspace logs. | 15:58:21 |
| dramforever | i don't know what other logs are showing up, but if that's all that's shown maybe the vm didn't work at all | 15:59:49 |
