Originally published on February 23, 2023 at https://bruno.verachten.fr/2023/02/23/minijen-and-risc-v/

Short Introduction

What is miniJen? It’s the Jenkins multi-cpu-architectures smallest instance known to this day.

It’s composed of a 4 arm Cortex-A55 cores RockChip controller ( aarch64 ), a 4 arm Cortex-A7a cores AllWinner agent ( armv7l ), a 4 arm Cortex-A53 cores AllWinner agent (aarch64), and a single RV64GCV core AllWinner agent ( RISC-V ).

A bit of personal history

I’ve been an arm fanboy for years, it all started in 2014 or so when I bought a Raspberry Pi . \ At that time, it remembered me of my younger days when I used to tinker with an HP-48SX calculator, using assembly language , discovering new methods, new instructions, and new backdoors every other day. \ Later on, when resin.io (now balena.io ) ported Docker to the arm processor , I then became obsessed with arm and docker.

I spent way too much time compiling FOSS for arm32 and aarch64 , and building docker images around them.…