RISC-V firmware project wants every board booting from the same hymn sheet

SOFTWARE

HFI proposes a familiar PC-style route from power-on to operating system

Another month, another ambitious idea from Yuri Zaporozhets: a proposal for a standard PC-style BIOS for RISC-V computers.

The Harmonic Firmware Initiative, or HFI for short, is simple and appealing in principle, but will be considerably harder to implement. From the project's own description, it aims to provide a BIOS-like experience, familiar from x86 PCs, for RISC-V hardware. When the machine starts, the firmware would identify the system and its hardware, list what peripherals are connected, offer the option to enter a setup program – and then hand over to U-Boot to load an OS.

If the name seems familiar, this may be because last month we looked at several of Zaporozhets's previous projects, including his GateMate PC, the System/359 micro-mainframe, his 64-bit RISC-V version of QNX 6 QRV, and most recently, his QSOE RISC-V RTOS, which offers a choice of seL4 or its own in-house kernels.

One part of the GateMate RISC-V PC project is a PC-style modular BIOS. This includes a video BIOS for the GateMate PC's bespoke video adapter. The HFI proposal is somewhat different. It's intended to work with an existing, standard RISC-V bootloader, the RISC-V version of the FOSS cross-platform bootloader Das U-Boot. It does include a video BIOS, though, one designed to initialize arbitrary video hardware in a standard way and bring it up to a VGA-like text mode.

For now, Zaporozhets is developing HFI on his SiFive HiFive Unmatched. In that motherboard's PCIe slot, he has an old Nvidia GK208 graphics card, and his firmware can initialize that and show a text-based boot-up display, without using any old x86 BIOS code.

As well as the homepage, there's also a six-page white paper [PDF] laying out the idea in detail. In this, he does mention what could be seen as a rival – another RISC-V firmware offering, the EDK2 implementation of UEFI. UEFI is large and complex, and the white paper says that most current boards use U-Boot instead.

As the last section of the page says, this is an just an invitation with aspirations: "HFI is offered as an initiative, not a product to license. Its reference software is open by construction – HFI BIOS links U-Boot and carries U-Boot's license – and QSOE Systems stewards the whole: the interface specification, a high-quality reference implementation, and the porting to new controllers."

It seems like an excellent idea to us. The absence of standard firmware has been a handicap for all Arm-based computers ever since the chips caught on outside Acorn Computers. This is why Arm OSes are hard to transfer from one hardware platform to another, why every phone needs its own ROM images, and it's why the move to Apple Silicon meant the end of the Hackintosh world.

It would be very good news for RISC-V if it avoided the same fate. ®