Xen boots on the Spacemit K3: our first RVA23 board!

We announced this at the Xen Summit in Munich: Xen runs on the Spacemit K3, the first spec-compliant board (RVA23)!

Zheng Zhang (ISCAS, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences) came to us wanting to get into Xen RISC-V development. We couldn't turn away another reviewer, and he happened to have the one board we were missing. In fact, right now, the Spacemit K3 is the only board on the market supporting both APLIC/IMSIC and the H-extension and we don't have one yet.

Open source hardware showed its potential again here. I sent a patch series to fix boot issues on the HiFive Premier P550 and someone I’d never met picked those same patches up and booted a board I didn't have.

Xen boots a guest on real RISC-V hardware: HiFive P550

Xen now boots a guest domain on physical RISC-V hardware, not just in QEMU. The board we used ships a CPU designed before the hypervisor extension was ratified, which turned out to be the whole challenge.

XCP-ng BlogBaptiste Le Duc

Thank you Zheng Zhang for testing, reporting, and pushing this forward.

Of course, the long-term goal is to have this board running in CI on my desk at Vates' office, and we hope to grab one soon.

Know RISC-V, virtualization, or low-level dev? Come help us cover more boards!