Dear Gentoo folks :
It has taken a lot of effort but I managed to get my SiFive RISC-V
P550 board to boot and run entirely from an external attached SATA disk.
I am fairly sure that there is still stuff left behind on some flash
memory chip somewhere and that is the OpenSBI and U-Boot stuff.
I created a new GPT partition table on the boards NVME chip. It is
something called /dev/mmcblk0 and the partition data looks like this :
p550# fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.40.2).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 116.48 GiB, 125069950976 bytes, 244277248 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 175E3A93-158D-401E-BEC5-0041355DA342
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1 2048 1050623 1048576 512M EFI System
/dev/mmcblk0p2 1050624 17827839 16777216 8G Linux swap
/dev/mmcblk0p3 17827840 244275199 226447360 108G Linux filesystem
Command (m for help):
There is also some UUID data that I am sure to need later :
p550# blkid | grep 'mmc'
/dev/mmcblk0p3: UUID="6383942e-8974-4671-88f6-5dd37c045417"
BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4"
PARTUUID="0f600fa5-8141-4ed4-879b-a939ace93d5b"
/dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="EFI" LABEL="EFI" UUID="0AC0-79CF"
BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="931fec17-08d4-4220-97f9-be7b5fb014c0"
/dev/mmcblk0p2: UUID="ee902d2d-2420-419e-bb06-b43be416e780" TYPE="swap"
PARTUUID="8a5d1595-2a78-471f-a2b8-f89d05c1c108"
p550#
I extracted the stage3 file into the p3 partition there.
I am trying to follow the instructions for the AMD64 stuff in the
handbook. I do not think there are any docs for RISC-V. Really I just
needed to get the magic mounts done for /proc and /dev etc. Then I was
able to chroot into the stage3 and begin a few trivial steps.
I am not going with anything complicated at all and the "profile" is
whatever the default thing is. No desktop stuff at all. I was able to
setup a trivial make.conf file with nothing special in it :
p550# cat /mnt/gentoo/etc/portage/make.conf
# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically
# built this stage.
# Please consult /usr/share/portage/config/make.conf.example for a more
# detailed example.
MAKEOPTS="-j4 -l5"
COMMON_FLAGS="-O2 -pipe"
CFLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}"
CXXFLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}"
FCFLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}"
FFLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}"
# WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
# Please consult
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Changing_the_CHOST_variable before changing.
CHOST="riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu"
# NOTE: This stage was built with the bindist USE flag enabled
# This sets the language of build output to English.
# Please keep this setting intact when reporting bugs.
LC_MESSAGES=C.utf8
GENTOO_MIRRORS="https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/gentoo-distfiles/";
p550#
That works and so does the web-sync stuff and then I did the emerge of
whatever needs to be updated. Also I did emerge a trivial editor ed and
also vim. Here are the interesting buts from the emerge.log :
p550# grep 'completed emerge' /mnt/gentoo/var/log/emerge.log
1753148811: ::: completed emerge (1 of 3) net-analyzer/netselect-0.4-r2
to /
1753148889: ::: completed emerge (2 of 3)
dev-util/dialog-1.3.20250116-r1 to /
1753148918: ::: completed emerge (3 of 3)
app-portage/mirrorselect-2.5.0 to /
1753148982: ::: completed emerge (1 of 1)
app-portage/mirrorselect-2.5.0 to /
1753149691: ::: completed emerge (1 of 2) sys-apps/ed-1.21.1 to /
1753149787: ::: completed emerge (2 of 2) sys-process/time-1.9-r1 to /
1753149929: ::: completed emerge (1 of 5)
app-eselect/eselect-vi-20221122 to /
1753150056: ::: completed emerge (2 of 5)
dev-libs/libsodium-1.0.20_p20250606 to /
1753150345: ::: completed emerge (3 of 5) app-editors/vim-core-9.1.1500
to /
1753150619: ::: completed emerge (4 of 5) app-editors/vim-9.1.1500 to /
1753150643: ::: completed emerge (5 of 5) app-vim/gentoo-syntax-16 to /
1753151247: ::: completed emerge (1 of 10) app-shells/bash-5.3-r2 to /
1753151443: ::: completed emerge (2 of 10) dev-libs/libxml2-2.13.8-r2 to /
1753152456: ::: completed emerge (3 of 10) sys-devel/gettext-0.23.2 to /
1753152673: ::: completed emerge (4 of 10) dev-libs/libgcrypt-1.11.1 to /
1753152803: ::: completed emerge (5 of 10) sys-libs/pam-1.7.1 to /
1753152871: ::: completed emerge (6 of 10) app-crypt/libb2-0.98.1-r3 to /
1753152909: ::: completed emerge (7 of 10) net-misc/iputils-20250605-r1
to /
1753153184: ::: completed emerge (8 of 10) sys-apps/texinfo-7.2-r3 to /
1753153519: ::: completed emerge (9 of 10) app-text/po4a-0.74-r1 to /
1753153679: ::: completed emerge (10 of 10)
app-portage/portage-utils-0.97 to /
p550#
Now I am looking at the page in the handbook where it says we do then
"Installing a distribution kernel" and I want to run :
# emerge --ask sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel
That fails with a baffling message :
chroot# /usr/bin/time -p /usr/bin/nice -n +19 emerge --ask --verbose
sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel
--- Invalid atom in /etc/portage/package.use/zz-autounmask: dracut
* IMPORTANT: 3 config files in '/etc/portage' need updating.
* See the CONFIGURATION FILES and CONFIGURATION FILES UPDATE TOOLS
* sections of the emerge man page to learn how to update config files.
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
Dependency resolution took 5.06 s (backtrack: 0/20).
[ebuild N ] app-text/asciidoc-10.2.1::gentoo USE="-test"
PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_13 (-pypy3_11) -python3_11 -python3_12"
1251 KiB
[ebuild N ] app-eselect/eselect-rust-20210703::gentoo 5 KiB
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/lsb-release-3.3::gentoo 16 KiB
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/dtc-1.7.2-r2::gentoo USE="-python
-static-libs -test -yaml" PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_13 -python3_11
-python3_12" 166 KiB
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/elfutils-0.193::gentoo USE="bzip2 lzma nls
utils -debuginfod (-stacktrace) -static-libs -test (-valgrind)
-verify-sig -zstd" 11695 KiB
[ebuild N ] dev-lang/rust-bin-1.88.0:1.88.0::gentoo
USE="(-big-endian) -clippy (-doc) (-prefix) -rust-analyzer -rust-src
-rustfmt -verify-sig" LLVM_SLOT="(20)" 244290 KiB
[ebuild N ] virtual/libelf-3-r1:0/1::gentoo 0 KiB
[ebuild N ] app-arch/cpio-2.15::gentoo USE="nls" 1613 KiB
[ebuild N ] app-alternatives/cpio-0::gentoo USE="gnu -libarchive
(-split-usr)" 0 KiB
[ebuild N ] sys-kernel/dracut-107::gentoo USE="dracut-cpio -debug
(-selinux) -test" 524 KiB
[ebuild N ] sys-kernel/installkernel-60::gentoo USE="dracut
(-efistub) -grub (-refind) -systemd -systemd-boot (-ugrd) -uki -ukify"
30 KiB
[ebuild N ] sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-6.15.7:6.15.7::gentoo
USE="initramfs (savedconfig) strip -debug -experimental (-generic-uki)
-hardened -modules-compress -modules-sign -secureboot -test -verify-sig"
148586 KiB
[ebuild N ] virtual/dist-kernel-6.15.7:0/6.15.7::gentoo 0 KiB
Total: 13 packages (13 new), Size of downloads: 408171 KiB
The following USE changes are necessary to proceed:
(see "package.use" in the portage(5) man page for more details)
# required by sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-6.15.7::gentoo[initramfs]
# required by virtual/dist-kernel-6.15.7::gentoo
>=sys-kernel/installkernel-60 dracut
Would you like to add these changes to your config files? [Yes/No] Yes
Autounmask changes successfully written.
* IMPORTANT: 4 config files in '/etc/portage' need updating.
* See the CONFIGURATION FILES and CONFIGURATION FILES UPDATE TOOLS
* sections of the emerge man page to learn how to update config files.
real 13.43
user 7.50
sys 0.30
chroot#
I have no idea what is needed in that file :
chroot# cat /etc/portage/package.use/zz-autounmask
# package.use
dracut
chroot#
Also "Invalid atom" is a total mystery.
Is there a simple way to proceed here?
--
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
