>>      Is this a meeting that I could attend with two ideas to raise ?

 >>          ( 1 ) a Devuan Linux installer for aarch64

 >>          ( 2 ) also an installer for at least one RISC-V board

 >>      For number 2 here I am thinking :

 >>          CPU:   rv64imafdc
 >>          Model: SiFive HiFive Unmatched A00

     Thank you Ralph for the reply.

     I am taking a look at the site links posted above. They seem a bit
heavy handed javascript dragons to say the least. At this time my ideas
are preliminary at best and whimsy at worst. Therefore I do not want to
take up anyones time. If these Devuan distro meetings are the quarterly
variety then I would have better information to bring to the table on
the next meeting.

     I agree.

     There are four hardware options in my mind. They are all very low
cost and seem to be the most popular items in their respective markets :

     ( 1 ) RISC-V :

         ( a )  SiFive HiFive UnMatched

                https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched

         ( b )  StarFive VisionFive 2

                https://www.starfivetech.com/en/site/boards

     ( 2 ) ARM AARCH64 :

         ( a )  Raspberry Pi 4 Model b

                https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/

         ( b )  Raspberry Pi 5

                https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5

     I agree.

     At this time I have the RISC-V (1(a)) SiFive HiFive UnMatched up
and running FreeBSD UNIX and it has fully built the sources. The boot
process was tedious to figure out but thankfully many other people know
the details well. You are correct regarding hardware specifics because
the "SHU" ( SiFive HiFive UnMatched ) has a set of dip[1] switches on it
to select the boot methods. If one is lucky you may even figure out the
magic combination that works.

     Thankfully the U-Boot people[2] have done a lot of work related to
the contents of the SDIMM that ships with that unit. If the dip switch
settings are correct it does a fine job of getting early stage boot
moving along. Then it *may* read from some USB attached media. It did
take me a while to load the onboard flash memory and figure out the dip
switches. With the use of an old Fluke multimeter and some patience the
board boots from flash now and then drags itself towards the expensive
Samsung 990 SSD M.2 I installed. The entire board seems painfully slow.

     The StarFive VisionFive 2 (1(b) hereafter known as "SV2") seems to
run FreeBSD UNIX with plenty of clunky gymnastics. Someone else in my
life has that sorted out. It was a non-trivial process. I suspect the
same SDIMM gymnastics are required with stages of boot code therein. The
creation of an ext2 filesystem region on the SDIMM with a reasonable
initrd would seem to be the task at hand for both the SHU and the SV2.

     ARM AARCH64 type hardware is all over the market where the entry
point seems to be the very popular Raspberry Pi as I note above. The two
models of interest ( above ) seem to be the lastest fashion. I will most
likely get one of each into my little lab and begin digging into the
boot process of each. I suspect they have a multitude of device changes
between them.

     I know that the Gentoo Linux people have boot media for just about
everything one could desire. That even includes old old sparcv9 and even
the Intel Itanium IA-64 hardware. Yes that is still running. We expect
it to vanish in the next few weeks.[3]  I have Gentoo Linux running on
older Sun SPARCv9 hardware but it gets ever more difficult to justify
the power usage. In summary, there are very few places to turn to if one
wants to run a non-SystemD polluted IBM/Microsoft style Linux. Devuan
Linux is, in my opinion, one of the few that "just works". Therefore I
feel a bit of effort to get running on other hardware is reasonable.

     I will get the Raspberry Pi units listed above and also see what I
can do regarding the SV2. My SHU unit is struggling to run FreeBSD today
and that may not be for much longer. When I have more information of
material benefit I will be in touch.

[1] SiFive UnMatched with an AMD Radeon graphics board. The AMD Radeon
     has never worked for me. Not even once. Yet.

     https://www.genunix.com/dclarke/riscv/SiFive_Unmatched.png

garak$ uname -a
Linux garak 6.6.30-gentoo-ia64 #1 SMP Tue May 14 20:07:58 UTC 2024 ia64 
Madison GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
garak$ uptime
  15:09:16 up 113 days, 17:28,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
garak$
garak$ grep -E 'vendor|arch|model name|proc' /proc/cpuinfo
processor  : 0
vendor     : GenuineIntel
arch       : IA-64
model name : Madison
archrev    : 0
processor  : 1
vendor     : GenuineIntel
arch       : IA-64
model name : Madison
archrev    : 0
garak$