Building a low-key RISC-V Linux XIP System
Principal Software Engineer (and GM Konsulko AB) Vitaly Wool discusses new hardware designs based on RISC-V, an open standard instruction set architecture. In modern times, RISC-V SoCs quite often have QSPI flash onboard which makes them perfect candidates to use XIP (eXecute In Place) technology to execute directly from flash without copying the code to RAM first. That allows to optimize memory footprint very tightly and thus opens up to really low-power IoT Linux appliances. Vitaly presents a demo how to run a mainline kernel configured for XIP on a RISC-V board, and discusses extending XIP support for RISC-V to 32-bit and MMU-less systems for low-key battery-powered RISC-V systems with RAM shortage.