The RISC-V General Discussion / News Thread

OpenBSD now includes RISC-V and details supported hardware.

https://www.openbsd.org/riscv64.html

Current targets are the HiFive Unmatched, Beagleboard Starlight, and PolarFire Icicle.

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Nice. It is about time. I would think that the BSDs would be the first to get support since of the licensing, but so far that has not been the case.

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I am exited. We need open source Isa’s and architecture’s!!!

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I hear you, but they need to support it for or to take over. All I want is the information, all of it. Even zen 2 doesn’t show you certain registers and does whatever it wants with your commands for “safety” and “reliability”.

If I am dumb enough to destroy machine by writing to one core until it overheats, or to keep private information without encrypting it myself then so be it.

I don’t want a nanny, I want a computer that does what I tell it to do how I tell it to do it, even if it is stupid or dangerous or unsecured.

I can’t believe it took so long for me to hear about RISC V, I bought my desktop without enough research :frowning: Ryzen threadripper 3970x + ASUS prime trx40 mobo + ASUS dual rtx3070.
Once I began to understand how little I CAN UNDERSTAND about my system it made me sick. I even have a YT comment saying that we need open source architecture … and here it is.

TL;DR
I don’t care if they get the devil involved, as long as it stays risc and open source and Turing complete; there’s nothing the devil can do to stop us from doing what we want with what’s ours.

That is really cool that you did that. Personally I value freedom over security (I’m sure if your careful, don’t save passwords, and keep an eye on things you could be safe on it right?)

Mostly replying so I can check out your work later, buy also to add to the conversation. Security is important; but not at the expense of ownership.

What’s mine is mine, I should be able to look at any register I want. The computer should do what I tell it to do how I tell it to do it (even if it happens to be detrimental or stupid)

At the moment I’d say BeagleV is the only option for anyone who may make use of “Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision” and “Neural Network Engine”. Going to hope supply meets demand, Tensorflow support is important for many.

The only thing which worries me about RISC-V is what board makers decide to do with their GPIO, you see so many “Pi-style” boards were each revision has their own weird incompatibility or some kind of voltage gap. I’m hoping Pine learned a bit from their Pine64 boards, eMMC port on the Quartz64 is handy if you don’t trust the reliability of SD cards. I’m hoping the PCIe slot on the Quartz64 opens the door for more card support on Linux.

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While I am slightly excited for open hardware and alternative ISAs, at this point in time there is not much to you can do about both availability and software support (that was true even before the economic terrorism). If you don’t use proprietary software, then POWER8 or 9 is great for now. But even then, I’m not aware of open hardware GPUs, just AMD and now potentially Intel with GPUs containing some firmware blobs inside their hardware, while having open source drivers.

So, you did nothing “wrong” when buying your rig, other than maybe supporting what I would call an evil company like nVidia (and pretty much all corporations can “become evil” when they get big, at this point in time AMD can’t afford to do stuff to raise their revenue at the detriment of their customers, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for AMD either).

I’m awaiting more general availability of RISC-V SBCs and hoping to see something from Pine64, they are a company I could say I trust. My main PC is currently a RPi 4 model B 8gb version (in an aluminum case / heatsink with an OC) and it’s what I’m using to type this from. My setup is basically ready to be ported to RISC-V. The software I run was easily ported from x86 to ARM, it is currently available on POWER ISA as well, after a little more general availability, it should be available to RISC-V. Debian had about 80-90% of its repo ported to RISC-V 2 years ago (I can’t find Wendell’s review of the SiFive Unleashed, it seems to have been disappeared from the internet), so the situation should be improved by now. I’m not using Debian, but I could if I wanted to move away from ARM before Void gets support for RISC-V (which shouldn’t be too hard).

Pineone. RISC-V SBC under $15. Was announced in February.

Will run a XuanTie C906 processor. Unfortunatley, I think the RAM is going to be woefully inadequate at their price point. $12 boards from Sipeed have 1GB of RAM. Even if Pine doubles that, we’re still a long way away from even Raspberry Pi levels of performance that’s cheaper than an budget x86 ITX desktop.

I’m not aware of open hardware GPUs, just AMD and now potentially Intel

That’s because they don’t exist, full stop. While I very much appreciate AMD and Intel’s contributions on the software side, their hardware is defective by design due to the requirement to support HDCP.

That’s also going to relegate fully free devices to a niche space until consumers refuse to buy products with DRM. You can’t let users control their devices and prevent them from controlling their devices. There’s no workaround for that.

That said, fully free devices are in the works!

https://libre-soc.org/3d_gpu/

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I don’t think this ever got posted,

The irony is that Rene and I joke that he has had more recognition for this versus all of the work that the does with T2sde and the work he does to maintain old architectures in the Linux kernel.

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SiFive’s HiFive Unmatched ITX board has been discontinued due to supply chain issues.

Focus has shifted to their next-generation HiFive board and announcements should follow “soon”.

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Will be interesting to see how quickly the RISC-V ecosystem can catch up.

ARM has 30-40 years of tooling, industry support, etc. at this point and you can’t just develop that.

Either way good to have a truly open and independent architecture available.

They were CISC not RISC :slight_smile:

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yer rite.
excuse the error… old man reminiscing :smiley:

cisc complete instruction code.
risc reduced instruction code.

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Haha, I remember because I had an Amiga (which was 68k, CISC) and was lusting after the Archimedes when they came out. Which were RISC (the first ARM processors available for sale actually :slight_smile: )

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You can now get RISC-V in your ClockWork DevTerm

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link to the specific SKU store page https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-r01

The pixel 6’s security co processor is completely open source and open ISA

Its a RISC-V security chip

Google allowed the graphene devs to FULLY utilize this.

@SgtAwesomesauce thats actually particularly cool of google since instead of locking down their platform with it. They made it open and able to develop for. there is NO REASON the lineage rom for the pixel 6 shouldnt be as secure as graphene. That will show its just laziness on their end.

Since its source is made available when you build firmware for the 6

see the google developer docs and forum Documentation  |  Android Developers

Jealous. I might upgrade

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Looks like for $23.90 you can get a Sipeed Risc-V board with Allwinner D1, 512MB ram, and a breakout board with wifi and bluetooth. Add $7.07 shipping to USA.

For over $100 they have more of a RasPi form factor

Other interesting thing from MangoPi. Very small D1 board with some io, expansion, and integrated goodies. Only 64MB ram on package though.

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