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RISC-V port submitted for inclusion in GCC
- ramshorns 10y ago> + Copyright (C) 2011-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. > + Contributed by Andrew Waterman (andrew@sifive.com). It looks like there's been a resolution to the issue of copyright assignment that was preventing RISC-V support in GCC. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-RISCV-Lawyer-Hold https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-RISC...
- bluecmd 10y agoFWIW, that is what stopped OpenRISC to become part of mainstream GCC.
- Esau 10y agoI worry that when the time comes - RISC-V will not see high acceptence because it is too expensive for the performance it provides. I hope that I am wrong because I would love to own a truly open computer.
- ktta 10y agoI'm actually a bit more confident. The only thing stopping manufacturers in china from selling good CPUs (anything above tiny microcontrollers) is because their investment won't pay off in case they get sued. But with this open hardware, they can sell without any worries, anywhere (apart from the problem with following standards). I actually think that this might bring more investment and interest from them. Of course the high end CPUs won't have so much diversification due to the complexity and it's impossible for normal people to stay on par with the complex manufacturing process of <22nm, but baby steps I guess.
- ant6n 10y agoI'd be more worried about hardware backdoors.
- ktta 10y agoWell, I'm worried about hardware backdoors even now too. Although there is always the 'know your hardware' tag advertised with RISC-V, that's not going to change until we have complete control(or trust) of the fabs. It's a bit like people being worried about malware/adware/spyware on their phones/personal computers. Are you sure that right now, you have no spyware? How can you be sure if you're not compiled the code your self? If you did compile the code and read all the lines of the code you compiled -- great achievement!. So now, if your phone has been connected to the internet, how do you know there wasn't a vuln that wasn't exploited, and a root kit installed with the last app you thought was great and had to have it? Or even just the last JS block wasn't malicious? Sorry for the rant. I just wanted to convey complete security is an illusion we know and make ourselves believe is the real thing. I'm a lot more interested in the cost economics with RISC-V, and I don't really have to worry security right now in the MCU, embedded space, where it is manageable (atleast right now).
- xja 10y agoRISC-V really seems to be gaining momentum with 2 crowdfunded silicon implementations currently seeking funding: https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-v https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-v https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 Looking forward to a future where CPUs that are open hardware, from the transistor up are generally available.
- d33 10y agoWait, so this is mostly a microcontroller chip, right? I keep hearing about its applications in smartphones, but I kind of doubt it could make it @ 160mhz... not to mention PCs. Am I getting something wrong?
- PhilWright 10y agoRISC-V is an instruction set architecture (ISA) specification. So the standard is really just a definition of some instructions and what they should do. The unique part is the fact it is an open standard and so does not require any licensing or royalties. This means that anyone can then go away and build their own processor implementation to that standard. Intel could create their own chip for that instruction set and get it running at 4Ghz with your latest fab facility. At the other extreme I could sit at home and use Verilog to create a soft core that is downloaded to an FPGA and be up and running with a much slower implementation). Neither of us has to pay anyone for the right to do so and the code we write should work on both because it adheres to the same standard. In contrast, if you want to create an ARM or x86 processor then you have to pay a license fee. Even if you implement the entire processor from scratch and use nothing from ARM or Intel except the instruction set specification, you still need to pay and it is not cheap. There are many situations where you want to avoid that cost. A researcher wants to experiment with a new idea, you want an internet of things processor but cannot afford the license cost of an existing processor. Or your Samsung and produce zillions of phones a year and saving that dollar per phone is worth having. As the RISC-V standard is relatively new it means that the first designs to market are the targets that are easiest to create, so microcontrollers. SiFive are now moving up the scale and are working on a full processor with MMU that could be used to run something like Linux. I would expect to see something like that appear within a year or so.
- bostand 10y agoI find the "open the ISA and they will come" attitude very odd. The ISA is the least of your problems. In fact the cpu itself is not really an issue at this point. If you look up what linus and others have been complaining about it has almost never been about the cpu itself (which are all pretty open designs these days). What we need right now is open boot, open firmware and most of all, an open gpu that can compete with the state of the art.
- nickik 10y agoWhy cant we do all at the same time? There are different people and interest groups who work on these issues. The goal is to have a secure and open hard and software stack, all the way from the CPU to the top. There is clearly interest in a more standardized fully open ISA and that why it exists. There now other interest groups who want to build hardware for it, and others who want to build stuff on top of it. The people who work on open source firmware all suffer from the close source parts and all the unknowns of the software, and even worse they suffer from the multitude of hardware. Getting some consistency into this space with bottom up open standards can only be good.
- unwind 10y agoIn the embedded/SoC/microcontroller space, an open modern easily integrated set of cores seems like a very good thing to have to compete with ARM. If your chip is complex enough to need programmability (perhaps even only internally, i.e. a network switch or something), perhaps the choice between using an open core makes your final product cost $10, whereas tacking on licensing fees to third-parties would make it $11. More margin, more profit, etc.
- rurban 10y agoBeautiful and surprisingly small port! No gyrations at all.
- oretoz 10y agoRISC-V is a general puspose CPU architecture. Does something exist which is open like RISC-V but for DSPs? I am asking because unless we have that, no smartphone can be truly open and infact you can argue that it is what runs in baseband that needs to be open rather than on the main CPU. Ofcourse RISC-V is an architecture so not just applicable for smartphones but the point remains. RISC-V solves half the problem but what about the other half i.e. DSPs?
- phkahler 10y ago>> RISC-V solves half the problem but what about the other half i.e. DSPs? One thing at a time. I'd argue that graphics is still a huge hole in the open hardware world. There are lots of things to be done.
- oretoz 10y agoIs there something on the horizon for graphics and GPU?
- phkahler 10y ago>> Is there something on the horizon for graphics and GPU? There is the MIAOW open source GPU but it is based on an AMD instruction set, so it's probably not viable for general use. I believe in the short term the solution will be simply running LLVM-Pipe on a bunch of RISC-V cores for software rendering. The SoCs will just have frame buffer graphics. Another option is to have PCIe support (which HiFive is going to) so you could at least recompile an open source driver for a proprietary video card. I suspect that once RISC-V SoCs are running a full linux distribution with one of these inferior graphics solutions then people will jump in to make better open graphics hardware.