Show HN: Porting xv6 to HiFive Unmatched board https://ift.tt/hn1r9IC

Show HN: Porting xv6 to HiFive Unmatched board Hi HN, I ported the teaching OS xv6-riscv to HiFive Unmatched and got it running on real hardware, including passing usertests. I've been self-studying OS internals using the MIT 6.1810 materials. After finishing most of the labs, I was eager to see what it's like to run the OS on bare metal, rather than QEMU. The Unmatched may not have the latest RISC-V features, but it's well-documented, and the Rev B release has made it more affordable, which makes it a good learning platform. The porting process involved several interesting challenges: - Hardware Quirks: Handling things like enabling A/D bits in PTEs (the hardware doesn't set them automatically, causing page faults), proper handling of interrupts, and instruction cache synchronization. - Boot Flow: xv6 expects M-mode on startup, but standard RISC-V boot flows (typically via OpenSBI) jump to S-mode. To bridge this gap, I created a minimal U-Boot FIT image that contains only the xv6 kernel. This way, U-Boot SPL handles the complex CPU/DDR initialization, then hands control to xv6 in M-mode (skipping OpenSBI). - Drivers: Ported an SPI SD card driver, replacing the virtio disk driver. I wrote up implementation notes here: https://ift.tt/DGE6ZqH... Hopefully, this is useful for others who are learning OS internals and want to try running their code on real RISC-V hardware. https://ift.tt/ZcK2tkq January 10, 2026 at 04:07AM