Storage giant Western Digital has published full instructions for building the Gnome Desktop variant of the Fedora Linux distribution for RISC-V, targeting the SiFive HiFive Unleashed development board.
As part of Western Digital’s push to ship more than a billion RISC-V cores per year, as it moves away from proprietary architectures for its storage processing products, the company has been working heavily on development surrounding the open instruction set architecture. As part of that, engineer Atish Patra has published full instructions for building a RISC-V desktop – complete with the software you’d need for general-purpose use.
While based on the HiFive Unleashed development board, there is a reasonable list of additional hardware required to add storage and graphics capabilities: as well as the HiFive Unleashed itself, anyone wanting to duplicate WD’s approach will need the Microsemi HiFive Unleashed Expansion Board, a Radeon HD 6450 or similar Caicos-based graphics card, PCIe USB card for a keyboard and mouse, and SATA or NVMe storage for the operating system itself.
Atish’s full instructions, along with supporting software required for the build process, can be found on Western Digital’s GitHub repository.
Gareth Halfacree is a technology journalist and technical author best known for his work on the Raspberry Pi User Guide and an upcoming book covering the BBC’s micro:bit project. A keen open source advocate and RISC-V fan, Gareth is responsible for curating our fortnightly community round-up posts.