Last week SiFive published their HiFive Unleashed open-source boot-loader code for this first RISC-V SoC on their Linux-friendly development board. This code being open-sourced has already helped improve the support for the FU540 SoC within Coreboot.

The code open-sourced last week by SiFive allows for a fully open-source boot process after this first RISC-V developer board received some criticism for some of its initialization code being closed-source, namely around the SDRAM start-up code.

Prior to this open-source code drop, even in the Coreboot community it was commented that HiFive wasn't more open than the average ARM SoC. But now that there is this open-source reference code, the Coreboot support for SiFive's HiFive Unleashed development board can be improved.

As of this morning, the Coreboot FU540 port can now initialize the SDRAM based upon this open-source boot-loader code. The Coreboot port for this board has been a work in progress since landing back in April.