Welcome to the central repository for the RISE RISC-V Board Farm management software, hardware bring-up specifications, and CI integration architecture hosted at RISE Board Farm.
RISE is a collaborative, industry-led initiative under the Linux Foundation that accelerates open-source software development for the RISC-V architecture.
The core mission of the RISE Board Farm is to democratize access to physical RISC-V hardware, accelerating software maturity, toolchain readiness, kernel enablement, and upstreaming across the entire ecosystem.
- Moving Beyond QEMU: Software emulation via QEMU is widely available, but physical silicon is essential for validating real-world hardware performance, cache hierarchies, memory controller behavior, hardware vector extensions (RVV), peripheral driver stability, and true hardware regression testing.
- Empowering Open-Source Maintainers: Providing reliable, automated bare-metal infrastructure enables distribution maintainers (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Gentoo) and upstream developers to build, test, and benchmark daily mainline kernels and application toolchains directly on real RISC-V hardware.
- Deployment Location: Physical hardware is hosted and co-located at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (RISE Board Farm).
- Current Phase: Phase 1 (Labgrid Pilot MVP).
- Active Hardware Cluster: The pilot is built around an initial allocation of 20 Alibaba Zhihe A210 boards donated by Alibaba.
- Active Focus Areas:
- Configuring U-Boot TFTP boot and DHCP network boot pipelines.
- Integrating GitHub Actions self-hosted runners (
board-farm-controller) for automated PR validation.
The board farm rollout is structured into two macro phases:
- Phase 1 (Labgrid Pilot): Delivers automated hardware access for kernel testing, CI runners, and SSH debugging using a lightweight Labgrid setup.
- Phase 2 (OpenStack Cloud Production): Scales management into a production multi-tenant bare-metal cloud leveraging OpenStack Ironic, Redfish APIs, and OpenBMC controllers.
Phase 1 (MVP) Phase 2 (Production Cloud)
+-----------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------+
| GitHub Actions Workflow | | OpenStack Nova / Ironic Bare-Metal Cloud|
| │ | | │ |
| ▼ | | ▼ |
| Labgrid (Coordinator + Exporter) | ──► | OpenBMC (D-Bus / Redfish on Exporter) |
| │ | | │ |
| ▼ | | ▼ |
| DUT Serial/Power + U-Boot TFTP | | UEFI PXE Netboot + IPA eMMC Flashing |
+-----------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------+
- Management Software Proposal: Overall project scope, phases, roadmap, and use cases.
- Labgrid DHCP & TFTP Research: Labgrid 4-role process model, U-Boot TFTP vs PXE boot flows, and network isolation rules.
- OpenBMC RISC-V BMC Plan: Implementation plan for OpenBMC multi-host Redfish controllers on x86 exporter hardware.
- TFTP Boot & GHA Flashing Design: GitHub Actions workflows, TFTP boot, and exclusive container pool testing designs.