Codethink - Articles by Ben Dooks

Adding big‑endian support to CVA6 RISC‑V FPGA processor

Thu 23 October 2025 - Ben Dooks, Joseph Baker, Lawrence Hunter, Nazar Kazakov, Roan Richmond

We added big‑endian support for an open-source RISC‑V processor and booted Linux on it, using an FPGA board.

Bringing up a new distro for the CVA6 RISC‑V FPGA processor

Thu 09 October 2025 - Nazar Kazakov, Ben Dooks, Lawrence Hunter, Joseph Baker

In this blogpost we will cover how to bring CVA6 processor up with Linux on it and how we replaced the OS there with a different one, based on Freedesktop SDK, updating the kernel version on the way.

To boldly big-endian where no one has big-endianded before

Mon 10 March 2025 - Ben Dooks, Lawrence Hunter, Roan Richmond

Codethink investigates big-endian support on little-endian architectures by exploring RISC-V's new runtime-controllable endianness, with QEMU as testing base.

Watch: Real-time Scheduling Fault Simulation

Mon 30 September 2024 - Will Stonier, Ben Dooks

Catch up on Ben Dooks' talk from OSSEU 24, Vienna.

RISC-V: Exploring a Bug in Stack Unwinding

Thu 08 June 2023 - Ben Dooks

On one of our RISC-V projects, we were recently debugging a complex driver probing sequence in the U-Boot bootloader. Along the way we improved the debugging facilities available for U-Boot on RISC-V, specifically allowing developers and system integrators to see the callstack in the case that there is a crash during the early boot sequence.

RISC-V User space access Oops

Wed 21 April 2021 - Ben Dooks

As part of Codethink's interest in RISC-V I have been following the RISC-V kernel list. Whilst looking through the postings the following bug came up, titled: [syzbot] BUG: unable to handle kernel access to user memory in schedule_tail

Meet the Codethings: Ben Dooks talks about Linux kernel and RISC-V

Tue 05 January 2021 - Yasmin Ferreras Greenwood, Ben Dooks

Ben Dooks is our Senior Engineer and Open Source Consultant with more than 15 years’ experience contributing to Linux Kernel. Dooks joined Codethink 8 years ago, and since then he's been involved in a range of projects involving the Linux kernel, such as the MEG project, amongst others.

Investigating kernel user-space access

Tue 16 June 2020 - Ben Dooks, Kejia Hu

In 2018, Codethink worked with Lukas Bulwahn from BMW on a project investigating some core functionality of the Linux kernel that is relevant to safety considerations of an assumed system. We wanted to share some of our findings from this work, as it could prove useful to communities interested in using Linux in a safety-critical context.

Articles by Ben Dooks