14 ms·

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 (Goo

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/
    - esmi 8y ago
      Of any kind... I think the uA741 is about as open as any IC design can possibly be at this point. Still available from many places. Here is one. http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ua741.pdf http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ua741.pdf
  - nickik 8y ago
    Shakti, Pulp platform, OnChip and others.
- simias 8y ago
  Even if there were open RISC-V designs out there you'd need a way to make sure it's actually the design that's etched on the chip. It seems like a hard problem to solve. Even FPGAs (and their closed source toolchains) could be backdoored.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Super high security is just one application and not needed for most application. Also, taping out open designs is still far more secure then anything else.

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/
  - esmi 8y ago
    Of any kind... I think the uA741 is about as open as any IC design can possibly be at this point. Still available from many places. Here is one. http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ua741.pdf http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ua741.pdf
- nickik 8y ago
  Shakti, Pulp platform, OnChip and others.
simias 8y ago
Even if there were open RISC-V designs out there you'd need a way to make sure it's actually the design that's etched on the chip. It seems like a hard problem to solve. Even FPGAs (and their closed source toolchains) could be backdoored.
- nickik 8y ago
  Super high security is just one application and not needed for most application. Also, taping out open designs is still far more secure then anything else.