RISC-V project aims for one BIOS across boards

A new RISC-V firmware proposal wants to make booting these machines feel more like a PC. The Harmonic Firmware Initiative, or HFI, from Yuri Zaporozhets, sets out a familiar path from power-on to operating system: detect the machine and its hardware, list connected peripherals, offer a setup utility, and then hand off to U-Boot to load the OS.

The idea is straightforward, even if the implementation will be harder. HFI is meant to deliver a BIOS-like experience for RISC-V systems rather than rely on board-specific startup code. According to the project description, it is designed to work with the RISC-V version of Das U-Boot, the open source cross-platform bootloader.

Zaporozhets has been developing HFI on a SiFive HiFive Unmatched. In that board’s PCIe slot, he is using an older Nvidia GK208 graphics card, and the firmware can already initialize it and display a text-mode boot screen without any legacy x86 BIOS code.

Part of Zaporozhets’s earlier GateMate PC work also included a modular, PC-style BIOS, including a video BIOS for that machine’s custom graphics hardware. HFI takes a broader approach. It includes a video BIOS intended to initialize arbitrary graphics hardware in a standard way and bring it up in a VGA-like text mode.

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A six-page white paper [PDF] describes the project in more detail and identifies a possible alternative: the EDK2 implementation of UEFI for RISC-V. But the paper argues that UEFI is large and complex, while many current boards already use U-Boot.

The project’s homepage frames HFI as an open effort rather than a commercial product:

“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.”

The Register notes that the lack of standard firmware has long hurt Arm systems, making operating systems harder to move between devices and forcing many phones to ship with their own ROM images. For RISC-V, a common firmware layer could help avoid the same fragmentation.