Enabling an OpenStack-based cloud on top of RISC-V hardware
Diego Marrón, Aaron Call, Josep Ll. Berral, Ramon Nou
TL;DR
This work addresses enabling an OpenStack cloud on RISCV hardware to advance EU technological sovereignty through the EPI and Vitamin-V initiatives. The authors port OpenStack to real RISCV hardware using the Lichee PI 4A platform, building a custom Linux kernel with missing modules and transitioning from Sipeed's Debian subset to official Debian, while relying on Ansible for deployment due to gaps in Devstack/Kolla compatibility. A six-node prototype is deployed on RISCV boards (1 controller, 4 compute, 1 storage) to evaluate cloud services and identify maturity issues across OpenStack components. The study demonstrates the feasibility of RISCV-based cloud workloads on real hardware and provides a concrete workflow for kernel customization and Ansible-driven deployment, informing future production-ready RISCV data centers.
Abstract
The European Union's technological sovereignty strategy centers around the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture, with the European Processor Initiative leading efforts to build production-ready processors. Focusing on realizing a functional RISC-V cloud ecosystem, the Vitamin-V European project developed an OpenStack cluster utilizing genuine hardware. In this poster, we detail the efforts done in porting and setting up the cluster and the many software services required by OpenStack to properly run on real hardware. In this poster, we detail our efforts on building an minimal viable prototype OpenStack cluster using real hardware. The cluster is almost functional, and we expect it to be complete in the next few months.