# Racklet Community Meeting Notes 2022

This document contains the notes of the [Racklet](https://github.com/racklet/) community meeting. The meeting occurs every other Monday at [4 PM UTC](https://dateful.com/convert/utc?t=4pm) (on odd weeks). Check the the [#racklet](https://osfw.slack.com/messages/racklet/) channel on the OSFW Slack for more info.

This document is best viewed and edited online: [](https://hackmd.io/GNrvcfXqSUaHeehBgfzTAg)

[TOC]

# December 19, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** December 19, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly Recap

- Daniel
- VisionFive / JH7100
- Got cacheable DRAM to work (missed a function from vendor code)
- [Fiedka v1.4.0 released](https://github.com/fiedka/fiedka/releases/tag/v1.4.0)
- Will be giving two talks at the end-of-the-year event
- One comparing oreboot on two platforms
- One on platform and system interfaces, mentioning Racklet :)
- Dennis
- Discussion: Using DeviceTree as a single source of truth for creating SoC/board hardware descriptions?
- DeviceTree supports custom metadata with custom nodes, but try to find an existing one for your data first
- DeviceTrees are parsed by multiple components, e.g. U-Boot and Linux, which might parse/interpret differently

# December 5, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** December 5, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly Recap

- Daniel
- VisionFive / JH7100
- Rewrote the vendor's [DRAM init code in Rust](https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot/pull/606) - it works :crab:
- Found a (double) [bug in vendor DRAM code](https://github.com/starfive-tech/JH7100_ddrinit/issues/14)
- Got two BL808 boards, will get more
- Got some [Rust code running on the WCH CH32V307](https://github.com/orangecms/ch32v307-rust)
- Talked about that [at Backspace](https://metaspora.org/microcontrollers-and-rust-wch.pdf)
- Dennis
- Modern, powerful Rockchip boards such as the [Orange Pi 5](https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/11/11/orange-pi-5-most-affordable-rockchip-rk3588s-sbc/) support M.2 NVMe and thus PCIe
- Found some interesting M.2 PCIe to SATA adapter "cards":
- [2 port version](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003353219891.html)
- [6 port version](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004543725000.html)
- These SATA adapters could be used instead of USB for more reliable storage in Racklet systems, e.g. the JMicron USB adapters are quite flakey (UAS unreliable, SMART doesn't work out-of-the-box), and one would need to find ASM1153E-based solutions etc. which are quite rare
- However, USB is much more versatile and we might now have space for SATA connectors sticking out of the back of SBCs
- And chips like the ASM1153E can be [purchased standalone](https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&origin=y&SearchText=asm1153e) if we feel comfortable enough in designing our own HDD backplane

# November 21, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** November 7, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly Recap

- Daniel
- [FOSDEM Devrooms are up](https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/)
- CfPs open for [Firmware, BMC and Bootloaders](https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/track/open_source_firmware_bmc_and_bootloader/) and [RISC-V](https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/track/risc_v/)
- Started drafting [psi-spec](https://github.com/platform-system-interface/psi-spec) eventually
- Rough [outline](https://github.com/platform-system-interface/psi-spec/issues/12) noted down, will present on it at [Fire Shonks :fire: :shark:](https://events.haecksen.org/fireshonks/) if accepted
- Conducted case study on rewriting [JH7100 DRAM init](https://github.com/starfive-tech/JH7100_ddrinit) in Rust :crab:
- About 5000 magic values written to magic registers
- Marvin
- Continued BMC work, target to release this year still active
- Initial BMC work on GXP SoC started

# November 7, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** November 7, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly Recap

- Daniel
- Attended another RISC-V dev board program meeting
- Communicated that the program is missing the gap between hardware and distros, i.e., firmware and kernel development / patches / upstreaming is rather neglected
- Got the JH7100 (VisionFive 1) first stage done and multi-stage setup prepared
- D1 SD card support in oreboot is WIP
- might get tackled end of November/start of December
- Sipeed announced more boards
- Kendryte SoC based on quite capable [T-Head C920 core](https://www.ithome.com/0/650/986.htm) (December)
- [Campaign for BL808](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sipeed-maix-new-experience-to-risc-v-aiot-tinyml#/) AIoT boards
- Bouffalo Lab [published the PAC](https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl808-pac) already
- Found a [RISC-V core generator thingy](https://chromite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview.html)
- Dennis
- [racklet-boards](https://github.com/racklet/racklet-boards) is now set up thanks to Verneri!
- We will aggregate key physical and firmware/software details of various SBC boards in this repo from different sources
- **Note:** not all of the boards that are in this repository will be automatically supported by Racklet, right now it is just for gathering information about typical dimensions etc. to ensure current and future board compatibility
- Thinking about the physical design again as we'll need to accomodate larger SBCs as well now that boards like the [VisionFive 2](https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/boards) and [Rock 5](https://linuxgizmos.com/rock-5-sbc-features-octa-core-rk3588-16gb-ram-and-triple-displays/) have fully abandoned the Raspberry Pi form factor (but still keep the header!) in favour of Pico ITX
- The final design will probably keep the vertical SBC slots in a tray, but the height of the tray might be 3U instead of 2U depending on what we want to make fit
- Marvin
- Received the hardware to work on for more BMC platforms other than ASpeed
- Finished the design of the operators PID1/supervisor functionality, allowing easier integration of arbitrary (non-go) programms included on the BMC side of things.
- This might be helpful for example to provide a service that distributes the emulated SD images to the racklet nodes.
- The supervisor interface supports cgroups(v2) and namespaces.

We drafted something: https://github.com/orangecms/racklet-rack-sketch

# October 24, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** October 24, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Daniel
- Attended the [RISC-V dev board program meeting](https://groups.google.com/a/riscv.org/g/devboards-program)
- Put the [ClockworkPi D1 module in a Waveshare PoE board](https://linux-sunxi.org/ClockworkPi_R01#Waveshare_Compute_Module_PoE_Board) meant for RPi CM3 :tada:
- Started a [board variant with a driver for SD cards in oreboot](https://github.com/orangecms/oreboot/tree/clockworkpi-r01)
- Started working on [SBoM utilities](https://github.com/platform-system-interface/sbom) in Rust (basics) and Go (turns out, [already done by 9eSec!](https://github.com/9elements/goswid/))
- Found that [Sipearl opened an office in Duisburg, right in my neighbor town](https://sipearl.com/en/sipearl-duisburg)
- They are part of [EPI (European Processor Initiative)](https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/project/consortium/)
- They do [RISC-V](https://sipearl.com/en), Linux and UEFI things
- Dennis
- The [final dhcp PR](https://github.com/insomniacslk/dhcp/pull/470) has stalled a bit, hopefully I get a response within this month so I can get the Talos PR finally merged...
- Next period just started at uni, quite busy with assignments atm.
- Read a bit about [Open Firmware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware)
- https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware
- Marvin
- Busy with project deadlines, almost no u-bmc/racklet work
- Started a bit reversing the HPE GXP (HPEs new BMC SoC) pre u-boot [bootblock](https://github.com/HewlettPackard/gxp-bootblock)
- Verneri
- Lab setup is now complete
- Procrastinated on coursework by looking into backplane signaling
- USB Full-Speed has quite slow frequency and rise times so sending data through standard pin headers shouldn't be a problem. (Computer motherboards already for front panel USB).
- Looking to order components for the next prototype quite soon.
- Compute adapter notes
- standardized Pi BMC hat with interfaces exposed to connectors

### Documenting supported SBCs

- New repo to track board specs:
- [racklet-boards](https://github.com/racklet/racklet-boards)
- board metadata in a [toml](https://toml.io/en/v1.0.0) file:
- `sbc/<vendor>/<model>/physical.toml`:

[dimensions]
# Dimensions are measured wrt. the primary side, which is defined as the side
# where the Ethernet port is located. If there are multiple ethernet ports,
# pick the (first) one that makes the width the smallest. The dimensions are
# determined by holding the board in one's hand and looking at the board from
# the primary side.

# The width and depth represent the size of the PCB without any connectors,
# while the height represents the total height from the bottom of the PCB to
# the tallest point of the tallest connector (e.g. the lip on the USB connector
# on the Pi 4).

# Example dimensions for a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
# https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rpi4/raspberry-pi-4-mechanical-drawing.pdf
width = 56 # The topmost dimension in the above document (millimeters)
height = 18 # Measured by hand, includes USB connector lip (millimeters)
depth = 85 # The rightmost dimension in the above document (millimeters)

[power]
connector = "usb-c" # Power connector type (lowercase string)
voltage = 5 # Input voltage (volts)
current = 2 # Maximum current draw excluding all peripherals (amps)

[hardware]
threads = 4 # Amount of logical threads (positive integer)
memory = [ 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192 ] # Available RAM configurations (mebibytes)

# October 10, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** October 10, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
:::

- Dennis
- Split the [INFORM PR](https://github.com/insomniacslk/dhcp/pull/470) into small fragments, and got all of them finally merged :tada:
- The INFORM PR itself remains however, so I'll need to ping the maintainers once more
- After this I can finally merge the [Talos PR](https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/pull/5897)
- Published a new [talos-bootstrap](https://github.com/twelho/talos-bootstrap) tool for bootstrapping provisioned Talos Linux clusters
- Feature and fix contributions welcome
- Currently written in Python, but will rewrite in Go at some point if this gains enough traction
- Avoid needing to `exec` binaries in favor of vendoring the tools directly
- Daniel
- Got a bunch of [CH347](https://www.tindie.com/products/johnnywu/ch347-development-board/) boards (multiple UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG)
- Switched to working more on UEFI things
- [UEFI PI in Rust](https://github.com/orangecms/uefi-pi-rs)
- [UEFI apps in Rust](https://github.com/orangecms/uefi-rs)
- Goal: An environment for explo(it|or)ing UEFI binaries
- Similar to [Qiling](https://qiling.io/) (Renode, Unicorn wrapper)
- Marvin (absent):
- Working on releasing current u-bmc state into the wild
- general cleanups
- buildsystem simplifications
- validation of new code on hardware
- Was contacted by ARM to help with SBMR spec and get u-bmc listed as reference next to OpenBMC
- Received access to more hardware for porting
- Asus Z10PA-D8 with schematics
- OCP Leopard (original machine u-bmc had been developed on)
- HPE DL360-PoC (modified HPE server with unfused GXP SoC)
- Multi machine (cluster) managed continues advancing
- clients will be able to address servers similar as kubectl can access a cluster
- Experimental Linux Unikernel patches released (enticing for u-bmc):
- Would allow single binary/process to be linked into Linux kernelspace
- Article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Unikernel-RFC
- Repo: https://github.com/unikernelLinux/ukl

# September 26, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** September 26, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Daniel
- Will get started with FPGA things now, too (iCE40)
- 2x [OrangeCrab board](https://1bitsquared.com/products/orangecrab), one of each size variant, big one can be RV64
- 1x [Tillitis Key](https://tillitis.se/) - not sure yet what to do
- oreboot has been overhauled completely, with only sunxi/nezha remaining
- VisionFive 1 is being reworked, can already boot through first stage
- [VisionFive 1 is missing docs](https://groups.google.com/a/riscv.org/g/devboard-community/c/utStFu8Q3A0)
- SiFive made a tool for [generating SVD from DTS](https://github.com/sifive/cmsis-svd-generator/issues/16)
- https://metaspora.org/oreboot-status-2022.pdf
- Getting back to Fiedka
- https://metaspora.org/firmware-sbom-annotations-audits.pdf
- [Runtime Behavior Analysis](https://github.com/fiedka/fiedka/issues/73)
- [Platform System Interface / Auditable Firmware Implementation](https://github.com/platform-system-interface/psi-spec/issues/4)
- Solaris on ARM and RISC-V:
- https://github.com/n-hys/illumos-gate/wiki
- https://www.twitch.tv/toasterson
- Dennis:
- A lot of school work
- Still working on the DHCP PRs

### Decoupling Device Trees from the kernel

- UEFI+ACPI enables board-agnostic images
- But so does DT as it is possible for the firmware to provide the DT to the kernel
- Supported by e.g. kexec as well as U-Boot
- **Lack of awareness** that this can be done
- However, no vendor currently does this as the firmware is also shipped on the same SD card as the kernel + OS
- This could be rectified by shipping the firmware as part of the board in e.g. a SPI flash
- Lack of interest in supporting this approach without persistent on-board memory
- For Racklet we would like to have the per-SBC BMCs provide the board-specific firmware so all boards are in an identical state when loading the kernel, this means that the board-specific DT is also provided by the firmware
- Issue: the Racklet project would need to maintain an ARM version of something like [XanMod kernel](https://xanmod.org/) or [Liquorix kernel](https://liquorix.net/) which carries all of the non-upstreamed patches for various boards and enables enough drivers so the kernel can be generic
- Maybe it would be possible to pool efforts into co-maintaining such a kernel with distros that could benefit from it as well?
- **TODO:** Look into how versioning of DTs is implemented in Linux - can you boot a modern kernel even if the firmware provides a DT that is slightly out of date? Has the decoupled DT model ever been validated?
- It seems that backwards compatibility is currently just a verbal contract: ["the kernel implementation must still recognize the old binding until old devicetrees have been obsoleted and no longer exist"](https://elinux.org/Device_Tree_Linux#forward_and_backward_dts_compatibility)
- DT version confusion: spec is at [v0.3](https://www.devicetree.org/), but files state 1.0?

# September 12, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** September 12, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Marvin:
- Talos PRs are merged and are scheduled for 1.3.0
- A lot of u-BMC worked happened
- CI and build system now based on [Dagger](https://dagger.io)
- Pico firmware boots and works to some degree, still needs more interface implementations
- WebUI [repo](https://github.com/u-bmc/ink) made public as there isn't much work I could do in private
- Renovate running on all repos to stay up-to-date
- schema repo got a new API for firmware flashing
- go-tuf got new releases :)
- other OSFC preps for next week
- Dennis:
- Updated https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/pull/5897
- Located and fixed the final DHCP update failure, INFORM requests were not received due to incorrect filtering
- The first [DHCP PR](https://github.com/insomniacslk/dhcp/pull/469) was merged! :tada:
- The [second one](https://github.com/insomniacslk/dhcp/pull/470) will still need to be split out into multiple smaller PRs...

# August 29, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
No meeting
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Marvin:
- Ported Talos to the NanoPi R4S: [pkgs](https://github.com/siderolabs/pkgs/pull/554) and [Talos](https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/pull/6111)
- Continued working on hardware simulator
- recent TinyGo 0.25 added the missing the RP2040 USB stack (needed for communication between UI and simulator MCU)
- simulator UI made with [Bubbletea](https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea/) and [Lipgloss](https://github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss/)
- Continued modelling u-bmc webui with multiple machine management in mind (e.g. Racklet)
- Continued with u-bmc build system improvements and automation

# August 15, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** August 15, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis:
- Still working on the DHCP hostname support in Talos Linux
- Lots of pinging finally got the FB/Meta engineers going...
- More changes requested week after week, but hopefully I'm closing in on the finish line
- Summer job now finished so will start to allocate a bit more time to working on Racklet and SD emulation
- Explained Racklet to some more curious people and they really liked it and want to stay updated :)
- Planning a Rust MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in my university - the embedded side will also be represented, but still early stages
- Daniel:
- Squashed the [underlying bug in rust-embedded/riscv that haunted us for a year](https://github.com/rust-embedded/riscv/pull/107)
- Now the D1 is super fast, with caching and ISA extensions working
- Got it to offer ethernet over USB gadget mode, running `cpud`
- You now have a `cpu` in your USB port! \o/
- Useful for Racklet?
- Drafting a [`boardcfg`](https://github.com/platform-system-interface/u-apps/issues/2) command for DTB config on a LinuxBoot system
- Marvin:
- Buf released [Connect-Web](https://buf.build/blog/connect-web-protobuf-grpc-in-the-browser)
- u-bmc schema already integrated support for connect-web
- Continued working with Talos and started adding more SBC support (NanoPi R4S)
- u-bmc cluster management (e.g. Racklet) still WIP, advancements are made
- TUF support with A/B UBIFS scheme being worked on for u-bmc
- Raspberry Pi support continues advancing, likely working by the end of the week
- Verneri:
- Moving to a new apartment
- Electronics stuff is already in boxes so FPGA stuff is on hold for some time.
- Also contributing to the Rust MOOC

# August 1, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** August 1, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis:
- More work on fixing Talos Linux, DHCP servers are weird
- RFC 2131 is kind of ambiguous wrt. how options transfer during renewals
- Got the implementation working with both dnsmasq and the Windows DHCP server finally
- Testing out the cloud-init [nocloud support](https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/datasources/nocloud.html)
- Works quite well with hypervisor platforms like Proxmox, hopefully something like this "standard" could also be used to transfer node-specific metadata to Racklet compute nodes without needing to bake an image per node
- Otherwise been really busy, haven't gotten around to working on the SD emulation more
- Daniel:
- D1 ups and downs
- Figured out how to enable cache, now it's fast
- Page load faults are popping up, but consistently with the same kernel components
- Other errors show up, might be related, but things got complex
- Can't get the extended MMU attributes (`MXSTATUS` bit `MAEE`) to work, has been an issue for a long while
- Debugging... lots of printf/`sbi_console_putchar` -_-
- Prototyping [SBoM features in Fiedka](https://github.com/fiedka/fiedka/issues/60)
- CoSWID does _not_ allow for verification, only lists claims
- Missing references to sources and locations in image
- SBC / Racklet firmware should have something, too!
- Want to push [AFI / Auditable Firmware Implementation](https://github.com/platform-system-interface/psi-spec/issues/4)
- [Pine64 update](https://www.pine64.org/2022/07/28/july-update-a-pinecil-evolved/) released
- JH7110 confirmed, will be larger form factor, like Quartz64 model-A
- Board name will be Star64
- Marvin (PTO):
- buf released [buf studio](https://buf.build/blog/buf-studio)
- Continued with u-bmc development
- gRPC schema taking shape
- initial testing on qemu and raspberry pi
- preparing design for multi node management (e.g. for Racklet)
- extend configuration management with etcd support

# July 18, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** July 18, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis:
- Still working on DHCP fixes for Talos Linux, but it's finally getting there in [PR #5897](https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/pull/5897)
- Depends on some fixes to the underlying DHCP library
- Different DHCP server implementations are quite quirky, coming up with a generic solution for bidirectional hostname passing was not easy
- That de-facto DHCP library used by Go projects is not the most elegant to work with, see lengthy discussion with the maintainer in [PR #469](https://github.com/insomniacslk/dhcp/pull/469)
- There are a bunch of PRs just lying around
- Will need to submit another one still that implements easy access to DHCPINFORM
- Other misc. things: Fixed a 1541 floppy disk drive over the weekend, it had a broken 6502 CPU :D Wrote some debug tooling:
- https://github.com/twelho/sram-tester
- https://github.com/twelho/rom-tester
- [Kestrel SoftBMC](https://gitlab.raptorengineering.com/kestrel-collaboration/kestrel-litex/litex-boards/-/tree/master)
- Marvin:
- Successfully installed a Talos Cluster with last time discussed fixes
- Got hold of even more BMC cards (including AST2600) to try software on
- Continued general development on u-bmc
- Currently making more things more configurable (e.g. no `sh` mode like Talos has)
- Integrated Generics and Structs into the RPC API in the [schema repo](https://github.com/u-bmc/schema/blob/988dc77fe18541e8eca79364cedc0147d32c8f8b/bmcapis/management/v1alpha1/management.proto)
- OpenTelemetry on hold until their metrics interface is out of alpha (for now the full OpenMetrics implementation works)
- Daniel
- Got memory mapping to work on the [JH7100](https://starfivetech.com/en/site/soc) (VisionFive) \o/
- [Documented setup for booting via mask ROM from SRAM + continue via flash up into U-Boot](https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot/pull/587)
- Hoping that we can reuse code for the upcoming JH7110 (not many details public yet, marketing calls it a "quad core upgrade" compare to JH7100)
- Started [u-apps for platform exploration](https://github.com/platform-system-interface/u-apps) based on [Bubble Tea 🧋](https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea)
- Drafts: `msrexplore` for x86 MSRs, `teaboot` as a fancier boot menu
- TBD: `csrexplore` and ARM counterparts
- Getting [Wi-Fi to work with the D1](https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723ds) (MangoPi and Lichee RV Dock), will attend a D1 hack week next week

# July 4, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** July 4, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Pine64 [launches in the EU](https://pine64eu.com/)! :tada:
- Prices are a bit high though, we'll see how this develops
- Marvin
- Installed a Talos Cluster in Hetzner
- Ephemeral encryption seems broken...
- Researched different ways to publish BMC interfaces via gRPC
- [Protobuf Structs](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/google.protobuf#google.protobuf.Struct)
- [Protobuf Generics](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/google.protobuf#google.protobuf.Any)
- Got new BMC cards with AST2400, AST2600 and AST2150 in addition to the AST2500
- Daniel
- WIP oreboot build system changes for full port build with all stages
- Based on Luo Jia's work, already got [bt0+main for sunxi/nezha](https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot/pull/590)
- Got so many D1 boards now, lost track of what I already shared
- 4 [D1 board pages in the wiki](https://linux-sunxi.org/Category:D1_Boards) now (ClockworkPi CM tbd)
- People from the [Anachro community](https://anachro.computer/) are planning a D1 hack week in Berlin July 25-31
- Embedded World was fun \o/
- First Rust :crab: code running on the JH7100 / VisionFive
- Dennis
- Bugfixing and improving Talos at work, PRs coming soon!
- Implemented DHCP hostname registration
- Fixed setting `talos.platform` via `extraKernelArgs`
- Worked on a new tool last week for resetting Epson printers, will be published this week
- [Raspberry Pi Pico W](https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-w-your-6-iot-platform/) released, might be interesting with its WiFi+BT+BLE capabilities
- ESP32 rival with essentially a much better software ecosystem
- Pico (RP2040) as a logic analyzer: https://hackaday.com/2022/03/02/need-a-logic-analyzer-use-your-pico/
- Need to research the code to see how synchronization and data streaming is implemented

# June 20, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** June 20, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis
- Discovering new K8s distros for Racklet
- Originally intended to use k3s + k3OS for "immutability" and declarative configuration/upgrades
- Now discovered [Talos Linux](https://www.talos.dev/), which basically does everything that k3OS does, but better
- Daniel
- Got [boot from (NOR) flash + DRAM init + load from flash to RAM](https://github.com/orangecms/test-d1-flash-bare/tree/dram-rerere) all set on D1
- See an [awesome demo](https://asciinema.org/a/502138) :tada:
- https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot/pull/583 documents the boot flow
- https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot/pull/585 by Luo Jia introduces a build system for a full image
- Distinguishing feature: First firmware with emoji on serial :crab:
- Booting into LinuxBoot with u-root fine so far, but hitting space limit
- WIP decompression in oreboot; kernel+initramfs can be shrunk from ~16MB to ~6MB
- Will be at [**Embedded World**](https://www.embedded-world.de/en) :wave:
- Verneri
- PMOD boards arrived
- Probing board works very well
- Heisenbug!
- SD traffic works reliably *only* while being probed
- Hypothesis: the driver has very fast rise times, and the probe loading limits the rise time.
- TODO: Make a SD to PMOD breakout with series resistors to experiment with rise times
- SD emulation
- Got the project vault SD card to SPI flash configuration working on the [Zybo Z7-10](https://digilent.com/reference/programmable-logic/zybo-z7/start)
- Reads from SD card work fine over a USB adapter with test data
- However, with real data (FAT partition table) the host flips out, resets and locks up the design :thinking_face:
- Marvin
- Finished u-bmc bootloader for RPi
- Advanced further on the u-bmc project in general
- Handed in a CFP for this years OCP Global Summit
- Started on a RISC-V design for a RMC card (larger scale than Racklet RMC but likely similar functionality minus SD emulation etc.)

### Talos Linux

- Racklet needs a lightweight primary K8s operating system to run on the nodes
- Talos Linux delivers:
- amd64 and aarch64 support
- Full immutability
- Runs from RAM
- Support for node-attached disks using Rook (Cephfs)
- **[WireGuard](https://www.wireguard.com/) VPN between nodes** with automatic setup
- (Relatively) [low system requirements](https://www.talos.dev/v1.0/introduction/system-requirements/)
- Easy [kernel](https://www.talos.dev/v1.0/advanced/customizing-the-kernel/) and [rootfs](https://www.talos.dev/v1.0/advanced/customizing-the-root-filesystem/) customization using containerized builds
- `talosctl` to easily provision and upgrade clusters
- Full mTLS GRPC between the cluster and `talosctl`
- Separate kernel + `vmlinuz` builds
- No `systemd`, `OpenRC` or anything else, just a lightweight Golang-based init
- This checks a lot of the boxes for the security, ease of use and customizability of Racklet

# June 6, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** June 6, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** N/A
- **Participants:** N/A
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Marvin
- Assembled RPi test fixture (3B+ connect to Pico via Grove cables)
- Switched over from protoc and gRPC to [Connect](https://connect.build) and [Buf](https://buf.build)
- Connect reduced dependencies and is easier to use than gRPC directly (gRPC compatibility given)
- Downside: Only Go support as of now (TS/JS planned)
- Continued advancing code-base in preparation of next Fridays Hackathon
- Verneri
- Received SD to PMOD and Pmod probe PCBs
- Did some more experimentation with the Pi 4 SD interface
- Looks like boot sequence frequency also depends on Pi 4 bootloader firmware version
- bootloader version `507b2360 2022/04/26` clocks SD card at:
- 160kHz enumeration, **33.33 MHz** operation independent of the value of `TRAN_SPEED` in the CSD register. :(

# May 23, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** May 23, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Verneri
- Managed to find a PMOD port on ULX3S that has clock capable input on same pin as on Zybo Z7-10
- Ordered test boards, should arrive in about a week
- PMOD logic analyzer breakout
- microSD to PMOD adapter
- Dennis
- Rich answered after many months to my question about licensing, we're now discussing future outlooks and use cases to determine the proper license for the repo refactor
- Found time to dig deeper into SD emulation, figured out where the latency comes from
- Marvin
- Got Seeed Grove HATs for Raspberry Pi test fixture
- Still busy with moving but continued on ubmc work on the Pi (spoilers ahead: Made a CFP for the next OSFC about it)
- Daniel
- Got a VisionFive from RISC-V Foundation eventually
- Got even more D1 boards \o/
- https://github.com/riktw/jeadock
- https://www.analoglamb.com/product/dev-lnx0004-allwinner-d1-risc-v64-development-board-dongshan-neza-stu/
- D1 DRAM init slooowly progressing :snail:

### SD emulation updates

- Tried different PIO programs to cut down on the ~5 clock cycle latency
- This didn't help, manual JMPs are just as slow as the WAIT instruction
- (There also is no one-instruction move from an input to an output)
- Schmitt triggers and slew control don't do anything for PIO controlled pins
- Overclocking adventures
- Overclocking to 250 MHz works out of the box by adjusting clock dividers, but any faster will cause panics and flash read errors
- Core voltage needs to be bumped and flash clock divider upped from 2 to 4
- **Latency is directly correlated with clock speed**
- This means that the signal quality is likely sufficiently good and there is no major impedance mismatch etc.
- The source of the latency is the *APB Bridge* between the I/O and PIO, which does buffering to prioritize bandwidth over latency. From Chapter *2.1.3. APB Bridge* in the RP2040 Datasheet:
- APB bus accesses take two cycles minimum (setup phase and access phase)
- The bridge adds an additional cycle to read accesses, as the bus request and response are registered
- The bridge adds two additional cycles to write accesses, as the APB setup phase can not begin until the AHB-Lite write data is valid
- The latency can be compensated for by storing and looking up the sampled values 5 cycles ago
- Now that the PIO approach is proven possible, I'll move onto implementing the actual SD state machine and functionality

# May 9, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** May 9, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis:
- Received an apartment on-campus and moving has taken a lot of time, no progress on Racklet stuff yet
- Starting my summer job tomorrow, Kubernetes stuff :)
- Marvin:
- Moving as well, so equally less time to continue hacking
- Continued a bit work on u-bmcs main operator process
- Daniel:
- Got a [MangoPi MQ-Pro](https://mangopi.cc/mangopi_mqpro)
- We're removing FSP stuff from oreboot
- D1 will soon be the first and only fully open oreboot + Linux SoC
- ESP32 input turned out to be an upstream issue, errata were applied to the HAL, works fine now :)

### Verneri's PMOD probing board

- PMOD [page](https://digilent.com/reference/pmod/start) and [specification](https://digilent.com/reference/_media/reference/pmod/pmod-interface-specification-1_3_1.pdf)
- https://github.com/chiplet/pmod-probe
- In his own words: "SD card to PMOD adapter for FPGA emulation"
- Goals:
- Better signal integrity
- Cleaner probe wiring for logic analyzers etc.
- Existing solutions from e.g. [Digilent](https://digilent.com/shop/pmod-tph2-12-pin-test-point-header/) don't have enough ground connections for logic analyzer inputs

### Nezha News

We can boot from SPI flash \o/
- GPIOs work
- Serial works; we can print "Rust :crab:"
- DRAM init is WIP
- Reading from flash to RAM is also WIP

# April 25, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** April 25, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis: Final course work still preventing larger work on Racklet, but managed to do some more SD card emulation tests and discoveries for my BSc thesis
- Daniel: Got more Lichee RV (D1) boards, added SPI flash chips, went further with Rust embedded book, PAC and HAL, interrupts, and ESP32 (not only for exercise)
- Marvin:
- Continued work on RPi Pico hardware sim in u-bmc org (repo will be called u-sim)
- Work on u-bmc itself continued. Base architecture redesign finished. Hardware target will first be all regular Raspberry Pis after ASPeed SoCs and Nuvoton will be (re)added.

### SD card emulation discoveries

- The Raspberry Pi bootloader does **not** clock the SD bus at the maximum speed of 25 MHz
- Pi 3B+ clocks: 128 kHz enumeration, 10 MHz operation
- Pi 4 clocks: 200 kHz enumeration, **13.33 MHz** operation
- With the simple wait-set loop in PIO assembly on the RP2040 10 MHz is barely sustainable, but 13.33 MHz is simply too fast (at least at the stock core clock of 125 MHz)
- I really need an oscilloscope to inspect the analog signal quality/integrity, might be an impedance issue
- Next steps for exploration:
- Overclocking (pretty trivial, but the signal degradation might be too significant)
- Faster polling: would it be possible to unconditionally sample on each cycle without waiting?

### Nezha News

- Work on D1 init is kicked off now
- https://github.com/luojia65/test-d1-flash-bare/
- https://github.com/luojia65/xuantie
- https://github.com/luojia65/D1-D1s-ROM-reverse
- Secure environments for RISC-V / RustSBI
- Hypervisor: https://github.com/luojia65/zihai
- Enclave for S and M mode is planned
- HDMI / Linux 5.18 working :)
- gist updated https://gist.github.com/orangecms/df0d3c15f9e32b5c708c021c4be8857b
- Another Lichee RV carrier board
- https://github.com/riktw/jeadock

### oreboot

- Now based on a Cargo workspace layout
- Increased build speed, ca 40%
- Intention to rework towards PAC and HAL structure
- PAC: yay!
- HAL: nay? Some issues with memory management, gotta check

# April 11, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** April 11, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis: School work keeping me busy, but should be able to proceed with the SD card emulation and repository refactor next week
- Marvin: Received a bunch of Pi Picos

### RISC-V / SBC News

- New boards will follow soon
- [MangoPi](https://mangopi.cc/) ([GitHub](https://github.com/mangopi-sbc/MQ-Pro)) ([review](https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/04/09/mangopi-mq-pro-a-20-risc-v-alternative-to-raspberry-pi-zero-w/)), clone of the RPi Zero 2 W, but with D1 and USB-C
- Sipeed with a new chip, maybe shipping with oreboot already
- D1 HDMI now works on 5.18 RC, smaeul's mainline WIP branch
- https://github.com/smaeul/linux/tree/riscv/d1-wip
- Daniel is trying to get it to work again with oreboot :grimacing:
- https://github.com/orangecms/linux/tree/5.18-riscv-debug

### oreboot

We're getting some structure, closer to other projects, with a new module/crate structure and Cargo workspace setup.

# March 28, 2022 3:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** March 28, 2022 3:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis: Finally received the 10" rack casing I ordered half a year ago, yay!
- Already mesured a bunch of dimensions, looks like solid choice
- Daniel:
- Got a WizNet W5500 controller working on the Lichee RV Dock
- [added DTS to Linux fork](https://github.com/orangecms/linux/commit/c180cf125a825fd3d03b048640403d2c4e968134)
- oreboot work: [RustSBI author contributing to move to using features over many crates and clean up structure and tooling](https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot/pull/553)
- New [Fiedka release v1.3.4](https://github.com/fiedka/fiedka/releases/tag/v1.3.4)
- CBFS (coreboot filesystem) support
- Support for DXE removal and BdsDxe replacement (e.g. inserting LinuxBoot)
- nicer layout with a feedback section and outline (currently for AMD only)
- someone already used it to deploy LinuxBoot on real hardware
- Marvin:
- u-bmc log rotation and TOML
- Verneri:
- Vacationing and computer upgrading
- Probing the SD signal to see the signal quality
- Received a ULX3S, will continue SD emulation with that

### The Flyht 10 inch Rack Casing

- Dennis: I finally received the [Flyht Pro Stage Rack 9,5" 6U Double Door](https://www.thomann.de/fi/flyht_pro_stage_rack_95_6u_double_door.htm) after half a year of shortage delays
- 6U as tall as they go at least in this series but it should be enough
- The price, dimensions, and robustness are quite well suited for use as a Racklet rack
- Here's a picture of what it looks like: 
- The 10 inch for factor dimensions are finally clear:
- The rack unit is **1.75 inches** (the same as for 19 inch racks)
- 9.5 inches is the **maximum device width** that will fit in the rack
- 10 inches is the distance between the **mounting screws/holes**
- While the 19 inch rack width includes the ears and vertical rails, 10 inch rack equipment is actually wider than 10 inches
- This rack has detachable doors on the front and back, they are approx. 6 cm deep and symmetrical (with the exception of the handle)
- The main body is approx. 25 cm deep and has 2 cm inset vertical rails on the front and back: 
- Usable depth for equipment is specified as 20.8 cm

# March 14, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** March 14, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Dennis:
- Contacted Rich wrt. relicensing, do want to hear his feedback
- RP2040 software SD probing quite reliable, moving on to data capture and state machine implementation next
- Verneri is having signal integrity issues with the FPGA SD emulation
- Will make a new adapter and probing boards for more reliable results
- Marvin: TinyGo project for RP2040
- Need to emulate some devices: PWM, I2C, SM/PMBus
- E.g. fan emulation
- TinyGo RP2040 support: PWM and I2C works, PIO support seems to also be in [place](https://github.com/kenbell/tinygo-rp2040-pio-example/blob/main/main.go)
- Daniel: Gave a talk on driver development via `cpu` at CLT
- https://github.com/u-root/cpu
- https://metaspora.org/drivers-from-outer-space.pdf
- https://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2022/de/programm/beitrag/226
- we're working on a second implementation in Rust :)
- `cpu` is getting some more fixes in addition
- e.g. so you can `echo hello | cpu remote tee /foo/bar`
- an improvement over the original!
- and port to FreeBSD is also WIP; maybe Redox will be next then

### Raspberry Pi 4 EEPROM Write Protection

- It's possible to officially enable write protection for all EEPROMs (bootloader and USB firmware): https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#eeprom-write-protect
- Requires the hardware write protect pin to be pulled low, this is achieved using TP5 on the bottom of the board, which is quite easy to solder to
- Newer Pi 4 models have the USB firmware embedded in the VLI controller, but should still be write protectable
- There's a debug bootloader one can flash to the EEPROM to debug the VideoCore over UART, it outputs a lot of information

# February 28, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** February 28, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- ODROID-C4 runs a U-Boot fork form 2015...
- https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c4/software/building_u-boot
- https://github.com/hardkernel/u-boot/tree/odroidg12-v2015.01
- Might try to upstream this at some point
- Oreboot support?
- 26k commit diff is painful https://github.com/hardkernel/linux
- Dennis: Will contact Rich regarding MPL-2.0 relicensing this week
- Repo refactor starts after that
- Daniel working a bit more on LinuxBoot, cpu and Fiedka at the moment
- Marvin working a bit more on u-bmc
- Marvin also got hold on two RP2040s to play around with

### Pi "netboot" (SD card remote flash)

- [Official beta feature](https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/network-install-beta-test-your-help-required/)
- Can we abuse it to load our own tools?
- Seems to be embedded into the RPi 4 EEPROM
- Loads the imager from RPi servers using HTTPS (which TLS version?)
- Puts the imager into RAM and executes it (without additional validation or authorization)
- The imager downloads Raspbian and puts it on the SD card
- Can the imager source URL be changed?
- Can the HTTPS certificate store be changed?

### u-bmc migration

- BSD-3 licensed
- Move out of u-root org to new home: https://github.com/u-bmc
- Split out the monorepo
- Code spring cleaning/rewrite
- Granular CI
- Will use https://github.com/bufbuild/buf to provide protobuf files then
- Thorough documentation coming

# February 14, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** February 14, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- vPub v4 is coming up
- https://vpub.dasharo.com/
- The new repo structure will be in place before that
- Little presentation on Racklet :)
- Repository discussion
- Using separate .gitignore and .gitattributes per repository
- Licensing: Apache 2.0 vs MPL 2.0 vs others?
- Ask @stacktrust at vPub
- https://gist.github.com/nicolasdao/a7adda51f2f185e8d2700e1573d8a633
- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/license-rules.html
- https://users.rust-lang.org/t/licensing-mit-apache-2-vs-mpl-2-0/46250
- twelho: Received the ODROID-C4 SBCs! Will take them for a spin tomorrow and see how they perform and what the boot flow looks like
- orangecms: D1 DRAM init C implementation is done and working now, translating to Rust is sort of started

# January 31, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** January 31, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Michael Engel
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Still updating/cleaning up the GH organization
- Planning on making a new release of https://github.com/racklet/render-drawio-action today
- Still more repos to clean up
- Unsolved issue: keeping template descendants up to date with upstream updates
- Figured out that .gitignore can't be a symlink
- Marvin: Worked more on Kubernetes on ARM64
- Mixed arch cluster experiments (x86 and ARM)
- D1 DRAM code is being ported
- Paul is doing initial work: https://gitlab.com/pnru/boot0
- Daniel is documenting and extracting register names https://gitlab.com/cyrevolt/boot0/-/tree/doc
- Daniel: Started looking into Rockchip
- not yet as promising in terms of firmware customization
- see https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot/issues/533

### Probing the SD interface with the RP2040

- twelho: Wired up the Raspberry Pi Pico to the SD slot of a RPi 3
- Wrote some Rust code for the RP2040, [rp-rs](https://github.com/rp-rs/rp-hal) is very nice and quite feature complete
- The PIO state machines are programmable with [pio-rs](https://github.com/rp-rs/pio-rs)
- Got the core up to 125 MHz (within spec, not overclocked) and captured the SD clock signal
- RP2040 is fast enough :100:
- There's about 35 ns of latency in a wait-set loop
- Going through the SM I/O mapping is about 10 ns slower

# January 17, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** January 17, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
- Michael Engel
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- Michael Engel joined, welcome! :wave:
- More research into how to implement the SD protocol with PIO
- Marvin: Started working with the EOS S3 eFPGA and refreshed my VHDL/Verilog knowledge
- Marvin: Used the same custom tooling to provision a fleet of servers (system-transparency) for u-bmc (aka progress in tooling)
- Marvin: Continued working on baremetal Golang for ASpeed (finally got a NDA with ASpeed as well)
- Daniel: WIP porting D1 SPL0 to Rust :crab:

### Refactoring the repositories

- Cleaning up unneeded forks and other cruft in the [Racklet GH organization](https://github.com/racklet/)
- Preparing to move to separate tagged repositories for hardware, electronics, firmware etc.
- All of these will be joined in tagged releases under the main repo
- ETA for refactor completion is this week

### Progress with SD emulation

- SD_Device needs some changes to support synthesis for ICE40
- Initially designed for Xilinx FPGAs
- Original code has Xilinx primitive instantiations e.g. for IO buffers
- ICE40 doesn't support asynchronous resets
- Figured out bidirectional pins
- SB_IO is a bit different than IOBUF (seems like output enable is inverted)
- Inference works well on yosys
- Can already see valid command/response traffic on logic analyzer
- There are some timing violations on internal paths (40MHz instead of 50MHz)
- Shows up as a block device on linux!
- ... but reads fail with an IO error

### Nezha News

- support for LinuxBoot with RustSBI now in upstream `main`
- can boot from SD card using the stock SPL/Boot0, though it makes some changes keeping Linux from coming up - reworking thusly
- https://github.com/smaeul/sun20i_d1_spl
- got two RV Docks from Sipeed and the 86 Panel
- https://linux-sunxi.org/Sipeed_Lichee_RV

### Misc

- KiCad 6 was released, looks very nice!
- A lot of papercuts were fixed
- We need to update the [`kicad-rs`](https://github.com/racklet/kicad-rs) tooling now
- Daniel: got a TV box based on the S905X4 - dev board now, UART is accessible :)
- Daniel: ordered a [MakerCase v2](https://www.conrad.de/de/p/joy-it-makercase-v2-sbc-gehaeuse-passend-fuer-entwicklungskits-raspberry-pi-acrylglas-klar-1720608.html) (multi-SBC stacking thingy) (variants for 2 and 8 boards exist, looks like they can be combined arbitrarily)
- 

# January 3, 2022 4:00 PM UTC

:::info
- **Location:** https://meet.jit.si/racklet-community
- **Date:** January 3, 2022 4:00 PM UTC
- **Host:** @twelho
- **Participants:**
- Dennis Marttinen, @twelho
- Marvin Drees, @MDr164
- Verneri Hirvonen, @chiplet
- Daniel Maslowski, @orangecms
:::

## Agenda/Notes

### Biweekly recap

- It's a new year, and with that comes an increase in the effort put into Racklet
- twelho: Multiple professors at Aalto are interested in Racklet, I've had and have upcoming meetings then to give a more in-depth perspective
- One of the professors recommended starting a European/Finnish equivalent of a Foundation, this would help with e.g. companies wanting to fund resources/hardware
- This is going to probably happen a bit later in the year
- Daniel: [Michael Engel](https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/michael.engel) might be intersted as well, got to know him through D1/Nezha community, will reach out and ask
- Work on establishing the OSF foundation deals with the same legal stuff https://opensourcefirmware.foundation/
- Holidays and vacationing
- In the coming weeks: upstreaming u-bmc work and writing documentation
- Progress on FPGA-based SD card emulation
- Docker without the daemon: https://github.com/ghedo/pflask
- Go implementation: https://github.com/u-root/u-root/tree/main/cmds/exp/pflask

### Logic analyzer update

- twelho: Have been playing around with the DSLogic Plus, got it to successfully decode WS2812B (neopixel) commands right away
- It feels reliable enough for debugging SD cards, and also the sampling does actually go up to the required sample rates even with the kind of cheap integrated probes
- Will test more protocols and actually attempt to debug an SD card in the coming weeks
- Verneri:
- SPI flash probing and decoding also works

### Nezha News

- LinuxBoot up and running
- can boot into OpenWrt and openSUSE
- oreboot used in [advertisements](https://twitter.com/OrangeCMS/status/1477670720742334476) already
- [`cpu`](https://linuxboot.github.io/book/cpu/) works
- little [testing tool](https://github.com/orangecms/hello-linux-rv64-rs) to print CPU, memory etc info
- OpenXiangShan will have the second high-performance RISC-V core soon (Nanhu)
- https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSiBKxoszz4

### New SBCs and embedded boards

- Daniel: more Lichee RV D1 modules and carrier boards, [NanoPi NEO (Allwinner H3)](http://nanopi.io/nanopi-neo.html) / https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=69&product_id=132
- Marvin: [QuickLogic ThingPlus EOS S3](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/17273) for use with [Amaranth](https://github.com/amaranth-lang/amaranth), [USB armory](https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/usbarmory) for [Tamago](https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/tamago)
- More about the [EOS S3](https://www.quicklogic.com/products/soc/) in the Thing Plus
- Dennis & Verneri: 3x [Odroid-C4](https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/)
- Amlogic S905X3 (12 nm)
- Boots by loading `u-boot.bin`
- Raspberry Pi form factor
- DDR4 memory (4 GiB)
- Daniel has a Khadas VIM1 (S905X)
- https://www.khadas.com/vim
- https://gadgetversus.com/processor/amlogic-s905x-vs-amlogic-s905x3/

### Progress on FPGA-based SD card emulation
- Tested to be working minimal "boot" image (820 kB)
- Only boots to the rainbow screen, but sufficient for testing SD emulation
- Breadboard prototype with:
- [TinyFPGA BX](https://tinyfpga.com/)
- SPI flash with boot image flashed
- connector to SD card break
- [FuseSoC](http://fusesoc.net/)+[Yosys](https://yosyshq.net/yosys/)+[nextpnr](https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr) based flow for simulation, and synthesis and pnr (place'n'route)
- Working
- ad-hoc SPI flash controller that can already read the boot blob from SPI flash (verified on hardware with pulseview and DSLogic Plus)
- TODO:
- [Wishbone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_(computer_bus)) interfaces between project value SD emulator and SPI flash

### Racklet roadmap 2022

- Target: working BMC enabled boot of a compute unit for OSFC 2022
- Research and develop firmware for Allwinner, Amlogic
- Currently most suitable SBCs:
- Odroid [Odroid-C4](https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/)
- Pine64 [Quartz64 Model B](https://www.pine64.org/quartz64b/)
- Pine64 [Rock64](https://www.pine64.org/devices/single-board-computers/rock64/)
- Khadas [VIM1](https://www.khadas.com/vim1)
- FriendlyARM [NanoPi NEO](http://nanopi.io/nanopi-neo.html)
- Radxa [ROCK3](https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock3)
- During spring: Get SD card emulation working (at least reads)
- Refactor website, documentation and repositories
- Move from an RFC-based model to tagged releases
- More automation and easier maintenance
- Establish a foundation for Racklet
- This will be done a bit later in the year