Porting GNOME OS to Microchip's PolarFire® SoC FPGA Icicle Kit for the First Time
Customers often require support to bring up new boards and architectures on Linux®. Codethink’s specialty is board bring-up and we perform a lot of work around board support packages, often for upcoming prototypes and commercial hardware.
Best Practice Open Source for Commercial Devices
Codethink helps our clients apply best practice open source for commercial devices and provides Linux kernel and Board Support Package (BSP) assistance to device manufacturers and platform providers. Our work includes kernel configuration and tuning, driver development, tools development, back/forward porting of changes and upstreaming as well as BSP updates and long-term production lifetime maintenance.
Codethink views RISC-V® as a growth market as we believe the market has shown time and again that open-source technologies win in the long term. For this reason, we are passionate about contributing and becoming heavily involved in early RISC-V BSP and kernel efforts.
GNOME OS on Microchip’s PolarFire® SoC FPGA Boards
Our strong interest in the future of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) technologies and RISC-V in general led us to direct our research and development budget towards supporting GNOME OS on our PolarFire® System-on-Chip (SoC) Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) boards as a first step in our involvement in the Mi-V ecosystem.
Codethink began thinking and working within this arena in 2021, displaying our early capabilities and passion for exploring the future.
Codethink has been participating in the RISC-V ecosystem for a while now, and our engineers recognize its potential to disrupt the tech landscape. We decided that the icicle developer board, based around our PolarFire® SoC FPGA SoC, was a good starting point for application-class RISC-V hardware.
If you want to try this work yourself, you can check the step by step guide in our blog post here.
Using GNOME OS to leverage Freedesktop Software Development Kit (SDK) simplified the process of creating an SD™ card image by merging the PolarFire FPGA BSP- and RISC-V-based root file system with GNOME OS to produce this Proof of Concept (PoC).
Given that the board was not designed with this use case in mind, this demonstrates the flexibility of our FPGA-based development board approach.
RISC-V has the potential to disrupt the tech landscape in a big way: it's already finding its way into hard drive controllers and soldering irons. Beyond the embedded market (typically the domain of Arm® CPUs and microcontrollers), RISC-V has its eyes set on the high-performance computing market where you'd typically find an ×86 CPU (servers and desktops). Codethink is interested in demonstrating that we can work with RISC-V across many domains.
In a nutshell, Codethink provides consultancy and software engineering services to international-scale customers. We help to design and deliver systems and software at all scales, from dedicated microcontroller/DSP/FPGA solutions to embedded medical devices, in-vehicle systems, network and cloud infrastructures. Codethink is one of the few firms in the market with the expertise to reliably deliver complete custom Linux systems and open-source solutions for critical devices and services. Bringing this knowledge to the forefront alongside RISC-V and FOSS is sure to create a winning formula down the line.
We are experts in FOSS and we participate upstream. Codethink is an active contributor to a wide range of cutting-edge FOSS projects, processes and cultures. We highly value the amazing contributions, made over decades, by the free software and open-source communities.
We help clients and partners take maximum advantage from the knowledge and technologies developed by the FOSS community. Even in situations where source code cannot be shared, our teams draw on and benefit from FOSS people, code, processes, insights and values.
Strong Leadership and Presence in RISC-V Ecosystem
We have found that Microchip provides strong leadership and presence within the developing RISC-V ecosystem and we look forward to exploring how we can help Microchip, its clients and partners to achieve cutting edge results moving forward.
If you need assistance in porting GNOME OS on PolarFire SoC FPGA, feel free to get in touch with Codethink, we would be happy to assist. Codethink will be presenting at the upcoming MI-V Summit this July 20th–21st, where we will present the work discussed here. It would be great to meet some of you there.
For more information about other RISC-V related projects done in the open by Codethink, please visit our blog here.
If you face any issues, or if any of our services are of interest to you, feel free to contact Codethink.