This document discusses porting the Alpine Linux distribution and EVE operating system to RISC-V processors. It provides an overview of RISC-V and describes how Alpine Linux and EVE-OS are well-suited for edge computing workloads due to their small footprint and use of containers. The document then outlines the steps taken to port Alpine Linux and its packages to RISC-V, including getting key packages like libunwind to build and working with the Alpine community. It concludes by encouraging more development of software for the emerging RISC-V server platforms.

1. Brought to you by
RISC-V on Edge: Porting EVE
and Alpine Linux to RISC-V
Roman Shaposhnik, CHO and Founder, Zededa
Kathy Giori, Ecosystem Engagement Lead, Zededa

2. Roman Shaposhnik Kathy Giori
CHO and Founder, Zededa QoDP, Zededa
■ Supreme hacking guru
■ Ex-wrestler but still all-around nice guy
■ Intellect and interests well beyond tech
■ Craft brew aficionado
■ End-user advocate
■ EE, so breaks sw :)
■ FOSS zealot
■ Bike, hike, row, ...

3. What is RISC-V?

4. RISC-V Overview
■ RISC-V is the 5th evolution of the
open RISC architecture that has
been used to teach chip design in
academic (mostly university)
settings for decades
● https://riscv.org/about/history/
■ Industry/universities established
the RISC-V Foundation in 2015 to
collaborate around the RISC-V ISA
specification and extensions

5. RISC-V Potential - New But Growing Quickly!
■ Mostly MCU class chipsets so far, but server class coming in 2022
■ Upstream Linux kernel development can start early on in chip design/devel
■ Niche customizations can optimize for cost, energy efficiency, size, perf, ...
Image source: https://riscv.org/exchange/

6. Bad News / Good News

7. Bad News: Hardware Monoculture is Tough
■ x86 is still extremely dominant
● Docker Hub tells the real story of how much server-side ARM is out there
■ Outside of x86 and ARM
● OpenPOWER
● MIPS, etc.
■ “Just porting UNIX” aka ”C” is no longer enough
● Java ecosystem
● Golang ecosystem
● Rust ecosystem
● Ruby, Python, Perl, etc.
● And then there are things like LuaJIT!
■ Efforts like Linaro are also not the answer

8. Good News: “Cloud Native” + Specialized OSes
■ We don’t need to wait for Red Hat & Co to give us everything
■ Cloud native
● Everything is a container
● Your infrastructure is immutable
● Container orchestration platform manages the lifecycle
■ Specialized OSes
● CoreOS
● ChromeOS
● AWS, GCP, Azure host OSes
● EVE-OS
■ An OS is no longer a gigantic integration point
● ...and thus we can do everything one container at a time

9. What is EVE-OS?

10. An open OS for the
“Edge”

12. containerd
IoT Edge Compute Hardware
Open
API
Partition A Partition B EVE managed, workload-centric storage
EVE services
EVE Controller
Disk overhead: 500M
RAM overhead: 500M
CPU overhead: 1core
Hypervisor (Xen, KVM, ACRN)
Dom 0 (2021: multiple Dom0s)
Dom 2
Dom
1
EVE Controller

13. How EVE-OS Blurs the Lines

14. Bringing Cloud-Native/Edge Under One Umbrella

15. EVE-OS Turns Your Edge Nodes Into a Cloud
EVE is an open edge computing engine and open API that
simplifies the development, orchestration, and security of
cloud-native applications on distributed edge hardware.
■ EVE-OS supports containers, VMs, and unikernels
■ Open APIs abstract away complexity and prevent
proprietary vendor lock-in
● Any centralized orchestration controller can take advantage
of the EVE-OS foundation
■ The flexible, open foundation enables edge
deployment IT staff to choose their favorite
hardware, applications, and clouds
EVE
Controller
(EVC)

16. Why Alpine Linux?

17. Because Modern OSes
Don’t Work at the Edge

18. OSes No Longer Needed as Integration Hubs
■ Alpine Linux: Just enough OS for any occasion
■ Immutable infrastructure vs. server state maintenance
● I want my packages to be glorified tarballs, not mine $BTC in their install scripts
● I want my init to get out of the way (let’s face it, I’ll be running kubelet or ... anyway)

19. Just Enough Package Management
■ Fresh ports served daily

20. Good Taste in Core Components: Focus on Small
■ Friends don’t let friends use GNU libc
■ Busybox userland, no-nonsense init system
Ubuntu Desktop
4.5GB
Alpine Linux
140MB

21. Not Obsessed by Cross-Compile, But Still Easily
Bootstrappable
■ RISC-V port was a pleasant surprise
■ No perimeter physical security
■ Awesome selection of entry points, from container rootfs all the way to
no-nonsense hardware bootstrap and iPXE boots

22. How We Leveraged Alpine to Build EVE-OS
■ Alpine packages are to Linux what Maven central is to Java
● It would be nice to keep historic versions around though

23. Alpine Packages are Composed Inside of OCI
Container Images
■ EVE-OS’s unit of integration is an OCI container image
■ Sometimes we rebuild, but thanks to abuild it is super easy
■ Leverages Docker registry for OCI container image management

24. Leveraging Linuxkit and Containerd
■ OCI containers are then composed by linuxkit
● linuxkit is a build tool + collection of software based on Alpine
● EVE-OS’s final image is less than 250MB in size
■ At runtime everything is orchestrated by containerd
● OS is immutable (but malleable), user containers are not
Source: https://containerd.io/

25. Porting to RISC-V

26. Two SBCs Available Today
BeagleV Beta (StarFive) Nezha (Allwinner)

27. Porting EVE-OS (and therefore Alpine) to RISC-V
[ 8.551801] systemd[1]: Freezing execution.

28. Summary: Porting Alpine to RISC-V
■ Got all the packages needed for EVE-OS
■ Have Alpine running on BeagleV Beta (discontinued) and on Nezha
■ Alpine community pitched in and now Edge is available for riscv64
■ alpine:edge docker image now supports riscv64
■ Upstream kernel is still a pain
■ A few packages still require work
■ libunwind & co.
■ Postgres and atomics

29. Key Takeaways

30. It is Time to Start Caring About Server RISC-V
■ RISC-V is no longer about qemu: SBCs are available and servers are
coming ‘22
■ RISC-V vs. ARM will be an interesting battle to watch on the server side
■ RISC-V is open and you can make sure the ISA matches your software needs
■ Wholesale porting of the entire open source ecosystem is not going to happen
overnight, but we can leverage next generation OSes like EVE-OS today
■ What will your project to bring to RISC-V?
■ … ScyllaDB?

31. Key EVE-OS Links

32. Linux Foundation Edge: Project EVE
Weekly meetings, Slack chat, GitHub source code, mailing lists
■ EVE Calendar - https://lists.lfedge.org/g/eve/calendar
■ EVE Wiki - https://wiki.lfedge.org/display/EVE/EVE
■ Mailing list - https://lists.lfedge.org/g/eve-tsc/topics
■ Slack - https://slack.lfedge.org/ #eve ...
■ GitHub - https://github.com/lf-edge/eve (and more...)
■ Docker Hub - https://hub.docker.com/r/lfedge/eve

33. Brought to you by
Roman Shaposhnik Kathy Giori
roman@zededa.com kathy@zededa.com
@rhatr @kgiori