4 ms·

Yeah I would love not being dependent on x86 and its horrid UEFI mess. Then again... I believe technically ARM (and even RISC-V) board manufacturers can also ma

by justaj 5y ago

Yeah I would love not being dependent on x86 and its horrid UEFI mess. Then again... I believe technically ARM (and even RISC-V) board manufacturers can also make something similar. Let's hope that doesn't become a thing though.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Why not? I've been working from the view that UEFI is the one of the few things worth keeping from x86_64 - I do not want to deal with every board having its own special boot process that prevents one disk being able to boot different machines. And UEFI is already here and works, so why reinvent the wheel?
- snvzz 5y ago
  RISC-V took steps to prevent chaos. The application profiles (like RVA22) have a bunch of requirements on hardware that must be present, the boot process and interface the firmware offers to the OS (i.e. opensbi).
  - NavinF 5y ago
    Ok but does any of that work in practice? Can I write a random distro ISO to an SD card and expect it to work on any RISC-V board that has the same pointer size? Cause that’s how it works in PC land thanks to ACPI tables. I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor! And apparently those are the only 2 boards with ISOs available 0_o
    - snvzz 5y ago
      >Can I write a random distro ISO to an SD card and expect it to work on any RISC-V board that has the same pointer size? Yes, you will be able to, at some point. >I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor! No board out there is RVA22 compliant, as RVA22 itself isn't done and closed. It is expected to be this spring. By the time large scale production of boards happen and they ship to the masses, this will be a solved problem. I do not expect this to happen this year. Maybe the next it'll start to pick up.
NavinF 5y ago
Now there’s a hot take! In PC land the same bootloader, kernel, config files, etc will work in pretty much computer. Hot swappable components are the norm here. Meanwhile in ARM/RISC-V embedded land, every chip and every board is its own special snowflake. With no ACPI/UEFI, someone’s gotta hardcode the config of every device on every board, including the ones inside the SoC. Naturally the communities around these boards are even more fragmented than Linux distros already are.
ulzeraj 5y ago
So you want yo be dependent on u-boot plus sketchy binary blobs mess?

by justaj 5y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

Why not? I've been working from the view that UEFI is the one of the few things worth keeping from x86_64 - I do not want to deal with every board having its own special boot process that prevents one disk being able to boot different machines. And UEFI is already here and works, so why reinvent the wheel?

snvzz 5y ago
RISC-V took steps to prevent chaos. The application profiles (like RVA22) have a bunch of requirements on hardware that must be present, the boot process and interface the firmware offers to the OS (i.e. opensbi).
- NavinF 5y ago
  Ok but does any of that work in practice? Can I write a random distro ISO to an SD card and expect it to work on any RISC-V board that has the same pointer size? Cause that’s how it works in PC land thanks to ACPI tables. I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor! And apparently those are the only 2 boards with ISOs available 0_o
  - snvzz 5y ago
    >Can I write a random distro ISO to an SD card and expect it to work on any RISC-V board that has the same pointer size? Yes, you will be able to, at some point. >I just checked the Ubuntu RISC-V download page and it has 2 different ISOs for 2 boards from the same vendor! No board out there is RVA22 compliant, as RVA22 itself isn't done and closed. It is expected to be this spring. By the time large scale production of boards happen and they ship to the masses, this will be a solved problem. I do not expect this to happen this year. Maybe the next it'll start to pick up.

NavinF 5y ago

Now there’s a hot take! In PC land the same bootloader, kernel, config files, etc will work in pretty much computer. Hot swappable components are the norm here. Meanwhile in ARM/RISC-V embedded land, every chip and every board is its own special snowflake. With no ACPI/UEFI, someone’s gotta hardcode the config of every device on every board, including the ones inside the SoC. Naturally the communities around these boards are even more fragmented than Linux distros already are.

ulzeraj 5y ago

So you want yo be dependent on u-boot plus sketchy binary blobs mess?