Assessment of the difficulty in porting CPU architecture for lk

[wangyuliu]

Hello everyone! I am working on implementing a tool to assess the complexity of CPU architecture porting. It primarily focuses on RISC-V architecture porting. In fact, the tool may have an average estimate of various architecture porting efforts.My focus is on the overall workload and difficulty of transplantation in the past and future,even if a project has already been ported.As part of my dataset, I have collected the lk project. I would like to gather community opinions to support my assessment. I appreciate your help and response! Based on scanning tools, the porting complexity is determined to be high, with a significant amount of code related to the CPU architecture in the project,such as assembly code. Is this assessment accurate?Given that LittleKernel has already been ported to the RISC-V architecture, can the difficulty of porting lk to the RISC-V architecture in previous architecture porting work be assessed as difficult?Do you have any opinions on personnel allocation and consumption time？ I look forward to your help and response.

[travisg]

In general porting a kernel to new architectures is a medium amount of work, mostly determined by the complexity of the architecture and how well the kernel abstracts the architecture specific layer. In the case of LK it's quite portable, so the amount of work needed to port to RISC-V was not much at all. One of the simpler architectures. I think it took me a few weekends worth of work, but that was about it.