experimental alpine image for the m1s dock (and most probably pine64 ox64 too)

[hexdump0815]

hi *,

this is not directly about this buildroot, but at least related to it and maybe interesting for people looking around here as the openbouffalo project and all the hype around the bl808 seems to have gone down quite a bit in the last months.

i have extended my little image builder framework which i use to build images for quite a few arm chromebooks, sbcs and other systems to also support simple alpine images and the bl808 based m1s dock and created a first experimental image with it.

in case you want to have a look at it, it can be found here: https://github.com/hexdump0815/imagebuilder/releases/tag/240525-01

it is based on the risc64 port of alpine edge and is rather simple … as it is that simple, it can be easily and normally updated to the lastest state via apk like any alpine system, only the kernel is hand compiled and will not be updated that way.

some notes/features:

• based on alpine edge riscv64 port
• the v6.5.11 close to mainline kernel used is based on the openbouffalo project kernel
• no display or gpu support as the kernel does not yet support any display hardware and the devices do not have a gpu
• it is intended only for booting the bootloader from the builtin flash and running the system from an sd card
• username/password is as usual linux/changeme
• basic wifi networking support is in the image as well, its just a bit special: see the readme in the linked repo dir of the download page
• basic usb support: for me it only works with usb 1.1 devices, everything higher does not work
• some build tools are installed by default as on this small system its much faster to delete them if not needed than to install them - for such tasks there are a few scripts in the /scripts dir

i plan to improve it slowly over time - this is just a spare time project, so i’ll work on it whenever i have some time and feel like it - maybe it fits the use case of someone here … it is most probably not perfect, but it might be a good starting point for own experiments and moving on from there, playing around with it or building own software on it etc. …

in case you have other riscv64 devices around as well: if you look next to that image you’ll also find debian sid images for the starfive visionfive v2 and the bananapi f3 as well as another experimental alpine image for the milk-v duo 64mb in other releases of that repo.

best wishes and good luck - hexdump

[gamelaster]

amazing work! Thanks @hexdump0815 for letting us know here :)