Introduction: MINIX 3 RISC-V port reaching bootable state (Community Branch)

[avrova%d0n2.in@localhost]

Hi NetBSD RISC-V Porting Team,

I am writing to introduce the recent progress we’ve made at The-Minix-User-Group (I'm leading the community effort along with a few contributors; we aim to modernize MINIX 3 for RISC-V and beyond) regarding the RISC-V port of MINIX 3.

I have successfully reached a stage where the MINIX microkernel can boot into a shell on RISC-V (QEMU virt target). Since MINIX 3 heavily leverages NetBSD's build.sh infrastructure and userland, the work done by the port-riscv team has been an essential reference for our implementation.

As we move toward stabilizing the system and implementing virtio drivers, I would like to establish a line of communication with the NetBSD community. We see potential for synergy in:

Toolchain Validation: Our port acts as an out-of-tree stress test for the NetBSD-centric toolchain on RISC-V.

Driver Ecosystem: We are exploring the feasibility of leveraging NetBSD's mature RISC-V drivers as reference implementations, potentially via the Rump kernel framework or driver adaptation layers.

If you are interested in the progress of microkernels on RISC-V, we would appreciate any feedback on our implementation.

Source: https://github.com/The-Minix-User-Group/minix

Cheers,
Avrova Donz (yangdongstation on GitHub)

--- RISC-V Port Status ---

Kernel: MINIX 3 (The-Minix-User-Group branch)

Status: Boots to /bin/sh on QEMU virt (rv64)

MMU/SBI: Sv39 enabled, OpenSBI 1.x

Current blocker: Occasional non-deterministic nbmake failures during parallel cross-builds.

Implementation Details (Trap Vector): https://gist.github.com/yangdongstation/fd4306be196342b57d90c735e5c153a4

We'd particularly value feedback on:
- Known pitfalls when extending build.sh for out-of-tree kernels
- RISC-V virtio driver bring-up best practices

Happy to provide more technical details or logs as needed.