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Debian port for RISC-V 64-bit
- lamby 9y agoRISC will change everything.
- keithpeter 9y agoWhat time-scale do you envisage for actual hardware?
- cyphar 9y agoIt was a reference to Hackers (1995). > Burn: RISC architecture is going to change everything. > Cool: Yeah, RISC is good...
- keithpeter 9y agoYou caught me there, but child comments give me hope
- richardxia 9y agoLinux-capable hardware will be coming out this year.
- desdiv 9y agoSome have already shipped[0], though the availability is very limited. [0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1
- rwmj 9y agoThese have very limited RAM, and won't run Linux.
- shakna 9y ago128MB Flash off-chip, and I know of several Linux distros that can run with under 50MB, so I would say it would be entirely possible to run it.
- navaati 9y agoI guess it's rather due to the thing not having an MMU
- Zaak 9y agoLinux can run on systems that lack an MMU. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/190350/mmu-less-kernel https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/190350/mmu-less-ker...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rvense 9y ago128 MB Flash, not RAM. Linux will run in 8 megabytes of RAM if you want. The SiFive board has 16 kilobytes.
- shakna 9y agoWhat's to stop you connecting up an old SIMM card? The memory won't be fast, but doable. I saw Flash as the larger limitation, as expanding that is problematic.
- rvense 9y ago> What's to stop you connecting up an old SIMM card? The memory won't be fast, but doable. There aren't enough pins. Certainly not enough pins accesible in single-cycle reads/writes. Maybe you could multiplex them with external hardware to talk to a SIMM but you'd be talking to memory at single megahertz effectively. An SDRAM controller in an FPGA on the other side of the QSPI link would be faster, but it'd still be slow. You could get it to work to say you've done it, but it'd run at literal-days-to-boot speeds. The board (and chip) is meant and marketed for freetards who like Arduinos - so I bought one and so did several of my friends. LEDs were blinked and better futures dreamt of. It's cool. But it's not a workstation chip by any stretch of the imagination. Hopefully the next version will have a real external memory bus.
- pantalaimon 9y agoWhere did you find this bit of information?
- feld 9y agoAt MeetBSD 2016 they announced a roadmap of a Raspberry Pi type device by end of 2017
- phkahler 9y agoSiFive has been late with their U500 or it would exist already. I suspect they're waiting for finalization of the privileged instruction spec. Since they will have PCIe support I'm wondering if you could actually use it with commercial graphics cards and open source drivers. That would put real usable hardware out in the world late this year. There are other companies on the verge of releasing hardware implementations. But in every case, I would wait for the final specs before jumping on any particular hardware even if it shipped now. Other than the micro controllers of course.
- tyingq 9y agoThe one that's most interesting to me is lowRISC. Mostly because it has something tangible to offer as a differentiator other than the "open ISA". Specifically, the "minion cores"[1] Their initial use case for them sounds a lot like the PRUs on a BeagleBone board. Basically, it enables you to do hard real-time tasks like signal generation (controlling led matrices, audio) or fast data/signal acquisition, but without running some specialty os. The minion cores can read+write memory from the main cpu that's running normal Linux. That feature also gives them a little breathing room on initial pricing. Their SoC board would be viewed as competition for a $70 board, instead of competition for a cheaper Raspberry PI or similar. So, initial pricing wouldn't necessarily hurt the popularity. They seem to plan to have something out either this year, or sometime next year: "We are expecting to crowdfund an initial instantiation of the lowRISC platform during the course of 2017." [1]http://www.lowrisc.org/downloads/lowRISC-memo-2014-001.pdf http://www.lowrisc.org/downloads/lowRISC-memo-2014-001.pdf
- cyphar 9y agoYeah, RISC is good...
- trsohmers 9y agoHack the Planet!
- rwmj 9y agoFedora RISC-V port: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V
- EvgeniyZh 9y agoOther software support status for RISC_V: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-wiki/wiki/RISC-V-Software-Status https://github.com/riscv/riscv-wiki/wiki/RISC-V-Software-Sta...
- phkahler 9y agoAs someone who has followed tech for almost 40 years, I've watched a lot of things come and go. I've seen "the next big thing" go nowhere countless times while some obscure things surprised me. Well intentioned good ideas didn't make it because of external factors or they lacked enough momentum to push through developmental barriers. Having seen all of that, my assessment of RISC V is simple: If they complete the privileged spec as planned this year (and hopefully the vector extensions too) it's going to explode onto the stage like newly formed star. The ramp will appear slow to people with high hopes and unrealistic expectations, but in the context of my life it will be a sudden shift the likes of which are rarely seen. That is IFF they get the specs finalized, and I hope they support Googles VM threads while they're at it.
- arca_vorago 9y agoIsn't risc/mips the only cpu that has a chance of being fully open sourced now? There is Power as well, but IBM has a funny way of "open sourcing" things.
- Sanddancer 9y agoThe patents on the older ARM processors have expired in the past few years, so there are open implementations of the first few generations of architecture. AMBER [1] is one such project. http://opencores.org/project,amber http://opencores.org/project,amber
- nickpsecurity 9y agoI'm not sure about that. What matters most is the ecosystem. That's why people pay for x86 and ARM. The ecosystem that RISC-V offers will need to be at least as good or good enough for whatever users. They'll also have to be successful with lower volume despite high costs of ASIC development. Finally, remember that OpenSPARC was around for a long time with open-source implementations like Leon3 that mostly went nowhere outside established companies already using them. I'm not so optimistic. I wish the best for them but precedents go against it.
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- eximius 9y agoDoes anyone know of good introduction for RISC V and why I should care about it from a technical perspective? I get the Open Source argument. And I get that x86 is full of warts and weird decisions. But does RISC learn from those mistakes and make something useable?
- rwmj 9y agoI think the design technically is more elegant. The instruction format is better: there are only a few formats, register numbers are always in the same place, which makes instruction decoding easier. The instruction set is also properly extensible, you can add extensions in an official way. They've avoided making lots of special-case instructions, claiming that micro-op fusion can be used to the same effect. The financial argument is: You want to license an ARM-like chip design, without paying any license fees. Lots of companies currently license ARM and use it to make everything from embedded controllers to tablet computers. They pay ARM both a one-off license fee and per core manufactured (actually the fees are not that large in the grand scheme of chip design). There are several RISC-V designs, which are BSD licensed, or you can make your own without any licensing fees. However if you want to call it "RISC-V" or use the logo you have to join the Foundation. If you don't want to call it "RISC-V" then the license is completely free. Of course what's missing is the ecosystem: Linux, Android, and massive numbers of tools. That's why this announcement of the Debian on RISC-V project restarting is interesting. (Forget about licensing an x86 design, that is basically impossible).