4 ms·

The C906 is very slow, but so is, it appears, the Pi Zero. The good news is that there are a lot of faster options right around the corner. The Pine folks is

The C906 is very slow, but so is, it appears, the Pi Zero. The good news is that there are a lot of faster options right around the corner. The Pine folks is working on releasing Star64 (quad SiFive FU740 1.5GHz) [1] and I know of at least two other RISC-V SBCs in the pipeline. I'm not quite ready to declare "2022 is the year of the RISC-V desktop" yet though. [1] https://www.hackster.io/news/pine64-formally-unveils-the-starfive-jh7110-powered-star64-risc-v-single-board-computer-3917fae60eb9 https://www.hackster.io/news/pine64-formally-unveils-the-sta... Note, the FU740 is in-order dual-issue with a comfortable L2 cache.

Narishma 4y ago
The Pi Zero uses the same SoC as the original 2012 Raspberry Pi, and it was already long in the tooth even then so that's not really surprising.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Yeah it's already legacy hardware, it should be comparing against the Zero 2 if anything, the original Zero was comically underpowered. But the speed is all but irrelevant, the issue with these alternative boards is always in software support. No point in using them even if they're twice as fast if I can't apt get anything and have to compile shit from source wasting 10 times as much time. Is there even an arch tag for riscv yet like armhf and arm64? I'd assume there is, but I can't find it and the support is likely to be abysmal this early on.
  - FullyFunctional 4y ago
    Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora have had distributions for many years. Others like FreeBSD, etc also exist. I often take a break and spend a day working entirely on a RISC-V host (BeagleV beta). Everything I care about work 100% the same, most notably Emacs and all the dev tools (Rust, C, Haskell). The only thing that I hit in the (old) Fedora 33/RISC-V is Firefox's lacking support for WASM, but that could be working in the latest version. If you want to try it for yourself under QEMU, I'd recommend following the instruction here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      > Introduced 2010; 12 years ago Ok, am I going completely mad? Feels like the first RISC-V a person could actually buy released shortly before the pandemic...
      - FullyFunctional 4y ago
        SiFive released the Linux capable RISC-V dev kits years ago and for long time now there has been many options besides what SiFive offers. Only few however are “cheap”. Maybe not mad, but certainly not very good at searching. CORRECTION: 2010 was the _founding_ of the RISC-V project. I don't have the date of the 1.0 release, but nobody would ship hardware based on a 1.0. Release 2.2 (user)/1.11 (priv) wasn't released until 2018! Light of this, hardware is actually coming out pretty quickly. Hardware is expensive and takes a long time. In comparison, Arm was founded in 1990. When was the first Linux-capable Arm-based dev board available for purchase? I'm probably as unhappy with the delays as anyone, but the momentum has not slowed and better options _will_ become available for sale.
        kragen 4y ago
        > Arm was founded in 1990. When was the first Linux-capable Arm-based dev board available for purchase? I think the first Linux-capable ARM-based dev board was available for purchase in 01989: the Acorn/BBC A3000 had an ARM2; the outdated https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/machines/riscpc/ https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/machines/riscpc/ says, "The support for these machines is now beginning to become increasingly difficult, however there is still support for them in the Linux kernel." This is misleading in two ways: 1. Linux didn't yet run on it, since it hadn't been written yet; the effort to port Linux to ARM started in 01994: https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/docs/history.php https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/docs/history.php 2. Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd., was spun out of Acorn in 01990, but the Acorn RISC Machine project started in 01983 and the ARM1 was first fabbed successfully in 01985. So the A3000 was shipped six years after the design effort began and four years after the first working ARM hardware. https://riscv.org/exchanges/boards/ https://riscv.org/exchanges/boards/ claims, "Nezha is a AIoT development board customized by AWOL based on Allwinner’s D1 chip. It is the world’s first mass-produced development board that supports 64bit RISC-V instruction set and Linux system." I find this hard to believe because the D1 just came out a year or two ago and I think the SiFive "HiFive Unleashed" shipped in 02018, and the "SiFive Freedom U540" was announced in 02017 https://linuxgizmos.com/sifive-launches-first-risc-v-sbc-that-runs-linux/ https://linuxgizmos.com/sifive-launches-first-risc-v-sbc-tha... after SiFive launched in 02016 https://www.wsj.com/articles/backers-of-open-source-chips-launch-startup-1468242001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/backers-of-open-source-chips-la.... Seems like they had Linux-capable chips sampling later in 02016: http://web.archive.org/web/20160915000420/http://hackerboards.com/first-socs-based-on-open-source-risc-v-run-linux/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160915000420/http://hackerboard...
  - rambambram 4y ago
    I've been using a RPi 4 with 8GB RAM and Ubuntu Mate as the OS for a full year now as my daily workstation. I code, I design... even video-editing and opening multiple tabs with YouTube works perfectly fine (although maybe not as fast as a beefier machine). P.S. Besides, it's perfectly silent, since a passive aluminum cooling block with a rib structure cools it enough.
  - ftml 4y ago
    We are maintaining an Arch Linux RISC-V port with ~85% of all Arch repo's packages ported, see our work at: https://archriscv.felixc.at https://archriscv.felixc.at Currently we already finished porting Chrome (thanks to openSUSE!) & Firefox, and Libre Office is on the todo list
    - FullyFunctional 4y ago
      Oh awesome, thanks for sharing. Some time ago I couldn’t find anything that looked like an active arch port. Any interesting challenges in doing this? ADD: OpenSUSE! how could I forget. Truly we are spoiled for choice today. I remember not that long ago it was * Buildroot and nothing more.
      - ftml 4y ago
        Indeed there're some challenging packages that we've made great efforts to port, and those efforts mainly happened at upstream level: adding RISC-V support for ldc, for chromium V8 (rv64 & rv32, both as joint efforts, great thanks to my college luyahan), for lldb-server (WIP), and crystal (WIP), etc. As soon as upstreams accept our PRs, all distros with RISC-V port can benifit from them, which IMO sounds like a better porting style than keeping a huge patch in downstream Arch-specific repo :-D BTW we also have an CI/CD available for upstream opensource developers to monitor their builds: https://ci.rvperf.org https://ci.rvperf.org
        FullyFunctional 4y ago
        Indeed, Chromium was one of the hard ones. Thanks again for your efforts. What is "ldc"? I'll keep an eye on https://archriscv.felixc.at/ https://archriscv.felixc.at/ and try out the current rootfs.
        ftml 4y ago
        Glad to hear that you'd like to try! You can report issues at https://github.com/felixonmars/archriscv-packages https://github.com/felixonmars/archriscv-packages ldc refers to the LLVM-based D Compiler: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  You have to admire how long Broadcom has been manufacturing that chip considering it isn’t an automotive or defense design…

Narishma 4y ago

The Pi Zero uses the same SoC as the original 2012 Raspberry Pi, and it was already long in the tooth even then so that's not really surprising.

moffkalast 4y ago
Yeah it's already legacy hardware, it should be comparing against the Zero 2 if anything, the original Zero was comically underpowered. But the speed is all but irrelevant, the issue with these alternative boards is always in software support. No point in using them even if they're twice as fast if I can't apt get anything and have to compile shit from source wasting 10 times as much time. Is there even an arch tag for riscv yet like armhf and arm64? I'd assume there is, but I can't find it and the support is likely to be abysmal this early on.
- FullyFunctional 4y ago
  Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora have had distributions for many years. Others like FreeBSD, etc also exist. I often take a break and spend a day working entirely on a RISC-V host (BeagleV beta). Everything I care about work 100% the same, most notably Emacs and all the dev tools (Rust, C, Haskell). The only thing that I hit in the (old) Fedora 33/RISC-V is Firefox's lacking support for WASM, but that could be working in the latest version. If you want to try it for yourself under QEMU, I'd recommend following the instruction here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    > Introduced 2010; 12 years ago Ok, am I going completely mad? Feels like the first RISC-V a person could actually buy released shortly before the pandemic...
    - FullyFunctional 4y ago
      SiFive released the Linux capable RISC-V dev kits years ago and for long time now there has been many options besides what SiFive offers. Only few however are “cheap”. Maybe not mad, but certainly not very good at searching. CORRECTION: 2010 was the _founding_ of the RISC-V project. I don't have the date of the 1.0 release, but nobody would ship hardware based on a 1.0. Release 2.2 (user)/1.11 (priv) wasn't released until 2018! Light of this, hardware is actually coming out pretty quickly. Hardware is expensive and takes a long time. In comparison, Arm was founded in 1990. When was the first Linux-capable Arm-based dev board available for purchase? I'm probably as unhappy with the delays as anyone, but the momentum has not slowed and better options _will_ become available for sale.
      - kragen 4y ago
        > Arm was founded in 1990. When was the first Linux-capable Arm-based dev board available for purchase? I think the first Linux-capable ARM-based dev board was available for purchase in 01989: the Acorn/BBC A3000 had an ARM2; the outdated https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/machines/riscpc/ https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/machines/riscpc/ says, "The support for these machines is now beginning to become increasingly difficult, however there is still support for them in the Linux kernel." This is misleading in two ways: 1. Linux didn't yet run on it, since it hadn't been written yet; the effort to port Linux to ARM started in 01994: https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/docs/history.php https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/docs/history.php 2. Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd., was spun out of Acorn in 01990, but the Acorn RISC Machine project started in 01983 and the ARM1 was first fabbed successfully in 01985. So the A3000 was shipped six years after the design effort began and four years after the first working ARM hardware. https://riscv.org/exchanges/boards/ https://riscv.org/exchanges/boards/ claims, "Nezha is a AIoT development board customized by AWOL based on Allwinner’s D1 chip. It is the world’s first mass-produced development board that supports 64bit RISC-V instruction set and Linux system." I find this hard to believe because the D1 just came out a year or two ago and I think the SiFive "HiFive Unleashed" shipped in 02018, and the "SiFive Freedom U540" was announced in 02017 https://linuxgizmos.com/sifive-launches-first-risc-v-sbc-that-runs-linux/ https://linuxgizmos.com/sifive-launches-first-risc-v-sbc-tha... after SiFive launched in 02016 https://www.wsj.com/articles/backers-of-open-source-chips-launch-startup-1468242001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/backers-of-open-source-chips-la.... Seems like they had Linux-capable chips sampling later in 02016: http://web.archive.org/web/20160915000420/http://hackerboards.com/first-socs-based-on-open-source-risc-v-run-linux/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160915000420/http://hackerboard...
- rambambram 4y ago
  I've been using a RPi 4 with 8GB RAM and Ubuntu Mate as the OS for a full year now as my daily workstation. I code, I design... even video-editing and opening multiple tabs with YouTube works perfectly fine (although maybe not as fast as a beefier machine). P.S. Besides, it's perfectly silent, since a passive aluminum cooling block with a rib structure cools it enough.
- ftml 4y ago
  We are maintaining an Arch Linux RISC-V port with ~85% of all Arch repo's packages ported, see our work at: https://archriscv.felixc.at https://archriscv.felixc.at Currently we already finished porting Chrome (thanks to openSUSE!) & Firefox, and Libre Office is on the todo list
  - FullyFunctional 4y ago
    Oh awesome, thanks for sharing. Some time ago I couldn’t find anything that looked like an active arch port. Any interesting challenges in doing this? ADD: OpenSUSE! how could I forget. Truly we are spoiled for choice today. I remember not that long ago it was * Buildroot and nothing more.
    - ftml 4y ago
      Indeed there're some challenging packages that we've made great efforts to port, and those efforts mainly happened at upstream level: adding RISC-V support for ldc, for chromium V8 (rv64 & rv32, both as joint efforts, great thanks to my college luyahan), for lldb-server (WIP), and crystal (WIP), etc. As soon as upstreams accept our PRs, all distros with RISC-V port can benifit from them, which IMO sounds like a better porting style than keeping a huge patch in downstream Arch-specific repo :-D BTW we also have an CI/CD available for upstream opensource developers to monitor their builds: https://ci.rvperf.org https://ci.rvperf.org
      - FullyFunctional 4y ago
        Indeed, Chromium was one of the hard ones. Thanks again for your efforts. What is "ldc"? I'll keep an eye on https://archriscv.felixc.at/ https://archriscv.felixc.at/ and try out the current rootfs.
        ftml 4y ago
        Glad to hear that you'd like to try! You can report issues at https://github.com/felixonmars/archriscv-packages https://github.com/felixonmars/archriscv-packages ldc refers to the LLVM-based D Compiler: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc
gjsman-1000 4y ago
You have to admire how long Broadcom has been manufacturing that chip considering it isn’t an automotive or defense design…