4 ms·

While looking for the successor to Raspberry Pi's, my interest revolves around how open source the drivers are and whether they're upstreamed or not. I have no

While looking for the successor to Raspberry Pi's, my interest revolves around how open source the drivers are and whether they're upstreamed or not. I have no interesting in a board, no matter how cheap, that will be stuck on some ancient, unmaintained kernel version. It looks like they're off to a good start but appearances can be deceiving. Kernel is a fork and who knows if it's missing anything. It's all pretty new so I wouldn't expect it in mainline. GPU (Imagination BXE4-32) also seems to have a pipeline towards upstreaming. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/STAR64 https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/STAR64 It's nice to see that it has onboard wifi. Barrel jack for power, rather than USB-C, is a little disappointing.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> Kernel is a fork and who knows if it's missing anything. It's all pretty new so I wouldn't expect it in mainline. Yeah, it's at an awkward point right now where you wouldn't expect to have drivers upstream, so it's harder to predict whether it will get where we want it.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
how much work/how long will it take before the kernel is not a fork/everything is upstreamed. 12 months? also, on my raspberry pi i at least stood a chance of running a headless chrome for some silly scrape job i had. RISC-V pretty much guarantees that's not the case, right?
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  RISC-V is unlikely to have native support from proprietary applications, if that's what you're asking. That said, I would be shocked if the open source chromium doesn't run on it either now or soon.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Got a VisionFive 2. I can confirm both chromium and firefox run. They even have javascript JIT, so the performance is good.
- viraptor 4y ago
  Plct is upstreaming support for browsers and a lot other apps: https://github.com/plctlab/PLCT-Weekly/blob/master/2023/2023-02-01.en.md https://github.com/plctlab/PLCT-Weekly/blob/master/2023/2023...

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

> Kernel is a fork and who knows if it's missing anything. It's all pretty new so I wouldn't expect it in mainline. Yeah, it's at an awkward point right now where you wouldn't expect to have drivers upstream, so it's harder to predict whether it will get where we want it.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

how much work/how long will it take before the kernel is not a fork/everything is upstreamed. 12 months? also, on my raspberry pi i at least stood a chance of running a headless chrome for some silly scrape job i had. RISC-V pretty much guarantees that's not the case, right?

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
RISC-V is unlikely to have native support from proprietary applications, if that's what you're asking. That said, I would be shocked if the open source chromium doesn't run on it either now or soon.
- snvzz 4y ago
  Got a VisionFive 2. I can confirm both chromium and firefox run. They even have javascript JIT, so the performance is good.
viraptor 4y ago
Plct is upstreaming support for browsers and a lot other apps: https://github.com/plctlab/PLCT-Weekly/blob/master/2023/2023-02-01.en.md https://github.com/plctlab/PLCT-Weekly/blob/master/2023/2023...