Ekaitz Zarraga

The talk is a review of my work on Guix's bootstrapping process for RISC-V. The presentation describes why we needed to make this, the challenges I encountered, what I focused doing, what is missing and how people can take part.

The bootstrapping process starts with Stage0-POSIX, then comes Gnu Mes and from there a bootstrappable fork of TinyCC is built. From that point, GCC is somehow built and then the rest of the distribution is built using it. In this talk, we'll discuss the last part of this process, from the bootstrappable TinyCC to the final GCC that compiles the world.

With NlNet's support, I spent some time this last year preparing this process to be ready for RISC-V. During the talk I'll share the work that has been done, I'll introduce some of the particularities that RISC-V has, why this process has been different to the other architectures and I'll describe the current state of the bootstrapping process and how it can be improved.

In this presentation I share my 1-year journey with RISC-V and how I started from nearly zero and I ended up porting Guile's JIT library to RISC-V and starting the RISC-V port of Stage0. This journey is full of uncertainties and chaos but that's what finally made this happen. During this talk we'll discuss how embracing chaos can lead to great change and how we can become the source of positive chaos in people around us.

This talk is not fully technical but many technical aspects are discussed as they are fundamental in the journey: instruction sets, assembly, debuggers, hexadecimal... and all sorts of low level wizardry will be mentioned and explained. I'll try to make my best to make all of it accessible to anyone with no previous knowledge about them, though.