[Caml-list] Status of the OCaml RISC-V port

["Richard W.M. Jones" <rich@annexia.org>]

Fedora has been maintaining an out of tree RISC-V patch in our OCaml
package for about 18 months, from:

  https://github.com/nojb/riscv-ocaml/commits/trunk

This has proven to be fairly stable, and I'm wondering when / under
what conditions it can go upstream?

RISC-V finally settled on a stable libc ABI (contributed to glibc
2.27) which has allowed us to start porting Fedora to RISC-V for real.
You can grab bootable disk images from:

  https://fedorapeople.org/groups/risc-v/disk-images/

and inside run 'dnf install ocaml' which will currently install
OCaml 4.06.0 with native RISC-V support.  There is also sshd,
systemd, gcc, etc., albeit lacking emacs :-(

At the moment you can run these on an out of tree qemu patch:

  https://github.com/riscv/riscv-qemu/tree/qemu-upstream-v6

which supports multiple virtual CPUs and (if you have fast enough
hardware) is fairly reasonable for development.

There are also development boards coming but it's likely you'll have
to wait til July for general availability and even then they will cost
$1000 and are not expected to have very good performance.  I notice
that avsm has signed up for one.

Rich.