Clonezilla Live on RISC-V (Part 2): From Porting to Mass Deployment

Speakers: Steven Shiau, Chen‑Kai Sun, Yu‑Chin Tsai

Room: CC 203

Time: Sun 11:20 am – 11:50 am

Format: Lecture (30 Min + Q&A)

Difficulty: Some experience required

Track: OSS Distributions

Presenter Location: In-person

Experience: several-th time speaking

At: at lfnw

Description:

As the RISC‑V ecosystem matures from development boards into production‑ready hardware, the need for reliable, scalable deployment tools becomes increasingly important. This talk continues the story of bringing Clonezilla Live to the RISC‑V architecture — moving from the challenges of initial porting to the realities of mass deployment.

The speakers first detail the technical hurdles of porting Debian‑based Clonezilla to next‑generation hardware such as the DC‑ROMA RISC‑V Laptop II (SpacemiT K1 SoC). Topics include navigating complex boot chains (U‑Boot → UEFI) and integrating vendor‑specific kernels and firmware (e.g., Bianbu Linux) to achieve stable bare‑metal booting.

Building on that foundation, the session presents a scalable strategy for provisioning RISC‑V clusters using HiFive Premier P550 boards and DC‑ROMA laptops. Instead of traditional PXE workflows, the team demonstrates a flexible “Net Clone” approach where clients boot locally and synchronize via Clonezilla Lite Server. This includes the novel BDMfRD (BitTorrent Deployment from Raw Device) mechanism, which distributes data peer‑to‑peer directly from raw disk partitions — eliminating intermediate image creation, reducing preparation time, and avoiding multicast bottlenecks.

Target Audience:

System administrators

RISC‑V developers

Cluster and deployment engineers

Anyone interested in large‑scale open‑hardware provisioning