4 ms·

This is excellent news. I wonder how long it will be until we can buy a full raspi-like platform that has no proprietary chips or firmware.

turblety 8y ago
What do you think of the HiFive Unleashed [1]. I don't have one but they have claimed [2] the entire boot process is free and open source? 1. https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/ https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/ 2. https://forums.sifive.com/t/who-should-buy-the-hifive-unleashed/1072/5 https://forums.sifive.com/t/who-should-buy-the-hifive-unleas...
- jstanley 8y ago
  Looks very cool, I'd not heard of this before! I can't see where you can actually buy one, or how much it costs, but looks like a project to keep an eye on.
  - RossBencina 8y ago
    Weird, there's something up with their Crowd Supply page. I saw the price there the other day (in the right hand panel that is currently empty): https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed The expansion board still lists a price: https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expansion-board https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expan... From memory, the HiFive Unleashed was on the order of $1000. The FAQ discusses why the price is high, they're planning for it to come down as demand ramps up. There's also an Arduino-like embedded board: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1
  - poizan42 8y ago
    The price for the initial batch was $999 a piece. Unless you can buy one from one of the initial backers I think you will have to wait for them to produce more of them.
floatboth 8y ago
Current RISC-V chips are still proprietary, it's only the ISA that is free. As for firmware, that's already pretty open with ARM. You can boot a Tegra X1 (Google Pixel C, Nintendo Switch) without any blobs with coreboot. (You still want one tiny blob — DDR4 training stuff — if you want your RAM not to be super slow.) Allwinner and Rockchip platforms also tend to not have blobs, at least not user visible/modifiable ones. You can even boot a Raspberry Pi without blobs https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware (but without usb/ethernet/etc.)
- nickik 8y ago
  > Current RISC-V chips are still proprietary Whenever people make statements like 'RISC-V chips' you know its wrong because their is a broad range of chips from many different people.
  - detaro 8y ago
    So then I'm sure you can name a counter example? What fully open chip can I buy?
    - rwmj 8y ago
      What fully open integrated circuit of any kind can you buy? Maybe there exist simple 74xx chips with completely open designs, taped out using open source tools, manufactured using completely transparent processes, and then independently verified to prevent backdoors? I'm not aware of any, but I suppose the military have something like this. Anyway depending on your level of trust at the moment you could: * Download rocketchip (BSD licensed) and run it on an FPGA. You'd have to trust the FPGA vendor and their proprietary tools like Vivado. This lets you run Linux, at a speed of about 50 MHz. * Run PicoRV32 on the reverse-engineered Lattice 8K FPGA using the open source toolchain. You cannot run Linux on this, but you can run short C programs without libc, and given that Clifford has done a very good job fully understanding the FPGA we can be reasonably sure there are no backdoors. My experiments with this are here: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/icestorm/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/icestorm/
huntie 8y ago
lowRISC[1] has been working on this for a few years now. I think one of the lowRISC people worked on the Raspberry Pi as well. [1] https://www.lowrisc.org/ https://www.lowrisc.org/
- imtringued 8y ago
  What is that supposed to mean? Did they design the video core 4 itself? Slapping proprietary ARM cores onto an existing proprietary design to make a crippled SoC isn't that useful if your goal is to make an SoC from scratch with a new ISA.
  - snvzz 8y ago
    lowrisc is the latter.
pjc50 8y ago
> no proprietary chips This is a huge boundary to cross, and I'm not convinced that it's actually worth doing.
analognoise 8y ago
Once somebody builds a competitive modern semiconductor process themselves, owns it outright, and is willing to publish everything about it. So, never.

turblety 8y ago

What do you think of the HiFive Unleashed [1]. I don't have one but they have claimed [2] the entire boot process is free and open source? 1. https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/ https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/ 2. https://forums.sifive.com/t/who-should-buy-the-hifive-unleashed/1072/5 https://forums.sifive.com/t/who-should-buy-the-hifive-unleas...

jstanley 8y ago
Looks very cool, I'd not heard of this before! I can't see where you can actually buy one, or how much it costs, but looks like a project to keep an eye on.
- RossBencina 8y ago
  Weird, there's something up with their Crowd Supply page. I saw the price there the other day (in the right hand panel that is currently empty): https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed The expansion board still lists a price: https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expansion-board https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expan... From memory, the HiFive Unleashed was on the order of $1000. The FAQ discusses why the price is high, they're planning for it to come down as demand ramps up. There's also an Arduino-like embedded board: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1
- poizan42 8y ago
  The price for the initial batch was $999 a piece. Unless you can buy one from one of the initial backers I think you will have to wait for them to produce more of them.

floatboth 8y ago

Current RISC-V chips are still proprietary, it's only the ISA that is free. As for firmware, that's already pretty open with ARM. You can boot a Tegra X1 (Google Pixel C, Nintendo Switch) without any blobs with coreboot. (You still want one tiny blob — DDR4 training stuff — if you want your RAM not to be super slow.) Allwinner and Rockchip platforms also tend to not have blobs, at least not user visible/modifiable ones. You can even boot a Raspberry Pi without blobs https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware (but without usb/ethernet/etc.)

nickik 8y ago
> Current RISC-V chips are still proprietary Whenever people make statements like 'RISC-V chips' you know its wrong because their is a broad range of chips from many different people.
- detaro 8y ago
  So then I'm sure you can name a counter example? What fully open chip can I buy?
  - rwmj 8y ago
    What fully open integrated circuit of any kind can you buy? Maybe there exist simple 74xx chips with completely open designs, taped out using open source tools, manufactured using completely transparent processes, and then independently verified to prevent backdoors? I'm not aware of any, but I suppose the military have something like this. Anyway depending on your level of trust at the moment you could: * Download rocketchip (BSD licensed) and run it on an FPGA. You'd have to trust the FPGA vendor and their proprietary tools like Vivado. This lets you run Linux, at a speed of about 50 MHz. * Run PicoRV32 on the reverse-engineered Lattice 8K FPGA using the open source toolchain. You cannot run Linux on this, but you can run short C programs without libc, and given that Clifford has done a very good job fully understanding the FPGA we can be reasonably sure there are no backdoors. My experiments with this are here: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/icestorm/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/icestorm/

huntie 8y ago

lowRISC[1] has been working on this for a few years now. I think one of the lowRISC people worked on the Raspberry Pi as well. [1] https://www.lowrisc.org/ https://www.lowrisc.org/

imtringued 8y ago
What is that supposed to mean? Did they design the video core 4 itself? Slapping proprietary ARM cores onto an existing proprietary design to make a crippled SoC isn't that useful if your goal is to make an SoC from scratch with a new ISA.
- snvzz 8y ago
  lowrisc is the latter.

pjc50 8y ago

> no proprietary chips This is a huge boundary to cross, and I'm not convinced that it's actually worth doing.

analognoise 8y ago

Once somebody builds a competitive modern semiconductor process themselves, owns it outright, and is willing to publish everything about it. So, never.