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I hope someday RISC-V boards graduate from Raspberry Pi 3 style "toys". The VisionFive is hard-wired to boot from SD card, like the RPi used to be, but they ev

I hope someday RISC-V boards graduate from Raspberry Pi 3 style "toys". The VisionFive is hard-wired to boot from SD card, like the RPi used to be, but they eventually realized that was a terrible limitation. The Milk-V Jupiter, a RISC-V board in an "ATX" form factor, can't boot from USB (without a special SD card to redirect to it). My message to RISC-V is this: Can't you just be normal?

brucehoult 2y ago
> The VisionFive is hard-wired to boot from SD card, like the RPi used to be Untrue. VF2 can boot (controlled by a DIP switch) from: - on board SPI flash - micro SD - eMMC - UART (XMODEM upload from PuTTY, Terra Term etc) > The Milk-V Jupiter, a RISC-V board in an "ATX" form factor, can't boot from USB (without a special SD card to redirect to it). Nothing can boot directly from USB. The USB protocol requires a large software stack. You need to first boot a BIOS/UEFI/etc from some other media such as EPROM / eMMC / SD with size generally between 8 MB and 32 MB.
- phendrenad2 2y ago
  Okay, I stand corrected. The VisionFive can boot from flash, SD, or eMMC. But still no USB. > Nothing can boot directly from USB I have a laptop from 2001 which can boot from USB. Yes, yes, TeChNiCaLlY it's booting from a BIOS chip. But I said "normal" so this is obviously what I meant.
  - brucehoult 2y ago
    So, the VF2 can boot from USB with, as you note, "a special SD card". Or with the contents of that SD card copied into e.g. the SPI flash. It's a dev board, where users are expected to be technical enough to do things like that, or connect a JTAG debugger or UART console -- and did so in the early days upgrading from e.g. the Image-55 the initial boards came preloaded with to, say, Image-69. At that time the SPL and Uboot images were still rapidly evolving. It's not a consumer PC where that capability would be in the SPI flash install from the factory.
    - phendrenad2 2y ago
      > It's not a consumer PC where that capability would be in the SPI flash install from the factory. These two things are not mutually exclusive. If people started shipping boards with easy defaults, I'd be happy, and I can't imagine anyone would become LESS happy.
      - snvzz 2y ago
        VF2 is the first mass-produced RISC-V SBC. There's been a lot of enablement by now, but the whole point was to get boards to devs so that they could do said enablement.
      - brucehoult 2y ago
        You can't do that until someone has written and tested the code for the "easy defaults". And you can't do that until that someone has hardware in their hands. If you want only company insiders to have hardware until every last bit of software is perfected then you can do that ... with your company. And you'll be releasing things to the general public at the same time as the other companies are releasing the next 2x better generation of hardware. Or, you could just yourself personally not buy things until they've been in the market for two years. Heck, I don't update to the latest OS version on my Mac until the next one is on the verge of coming out. I'm running Sonoma and recently it's been nagging me to update to Sequoia. Nuh uh. It's a mature product, progress is slow, and I don't even remember the last time there was a new feature I cared about. It's the same in Windows. Microsoft can't get people to upgrade from Windows 7, let alone Windows 10. RISC-V on the other hand is changing incredibly quickly. There was not even one RISC-V chip or board on the market when Windows 10 came out. There is genuinely exciting new stuff coming out every 6 to 12 months. The P550 boards in the last month, The SpacemiT boards with 8 cores and RVV 1.0 with a decent amount of RAM in the middle of 2024. The 64 core 128 GB RAM Pioneer in January 2024. The TH1520 boards with OoO and high performance RVV 0.7 in mid 2023. The JH7110 boards, the first cheap multi-core, in January 2023. I, and many others, prefer to get new hardware the instant it comes out of the fab in mass production, even if there will always be some rough edges. But you don't have to do that. No one is forcing you. You can wait a little until others (whether in the manufacturer's staff or not) have smoothed off the edges.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    You can have a u-boot in the SPI that supports usb boot. You can also have the experimental UEFI (edk2) image in the SPI.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    You might be interested in latest update[0] on VF2 edk2 effort. 0. https://youtu.be/PG4FrPDTUWA?t=348 https://youtu.be/PG4FrPDTUWA?t=348

brucehoult 2y ago

> The VisionFive is hard-wired to boot from SD card, like the RPi used to be Untrue. VF2 can boot (controlled by a DIP switch) from: - on board SPI flash - micro SD - eMMC - UART (XMODEM upload from PuTTY, Terra Term etc) > The Milk-V Jupiter, a RISC-V board in an "ATX" form factor, can't boot from USB (without a special SD card to redirect to it). Nothing can boot directly from USB. The USB protocol requires a large software stack. You need to first boot a BIOS/UEFI/etc from some other media such as EPROM / eMMC / SD with size generally between 8 MB and 32 MB.

phendrenad2 2y ago
Okay, I stand corrected. The VisionFive can boot from flash, SD, or eMMC. But still no USB. > Nothing can boot directly from USB I have a laptop from 2001 which can boot from USB. Yes, yes, TeChNiCaLlY it's booting from a BIOS chip. But I said "normal" so this is obviously what I meant.
- brucehoult 2y ago
  So, the VF2 can boot from USB with, as you note, "a special SD card". Or with the contents of that SD card copied into e.g. the SPI flash. It's a dev board, where users are expected to be technical enough to do things like that, or connect a JTAG debugger or UART console -- and did so in the early days upgrading from e.g. the Image-55 the initial boards came preloaded with to, say, Image-69. At that time the SPL and Uboot images were still rapidly evolving. It's not a consumer PC where that capability would be in the SPI flash install from the factory.
  - phendrenad2 2y ago
    > It's not a consumer PC where that capability would be in the SPI flash install from the factory. These two things are not mutually exclusive. If people started shipping boards with easy defaults, I'd be happy, and I can't imagine anyone would become LESS happy.
    - snvzz 2y ago
      VF2 is the first mass-produced RISC-V SBC. There's been a lot of enablement by now, but the whole point was to get boards to devs so that they could do said enablement.
    - brucehoult 2y ago
      You can't do that until someone has written and tested the code for the "easy defaults". And you can't do that until that someone has hardware in their hands. If you want only company insiders to have hardware until every last bit of software is perfected then you can do that ... with your company. And you'll be releasing things to the general public at the same time as the other companies are releasing the next 2x better generation of hardware. Or, you could just yourself personally not buy things until they've been in the market for two years. Heck, I don't update to the latest OS version on my Mac until the next one is on the verge of coming out. I'm running Sonoma and recently it's been nagging me to update to Sequoia. Nuh uh. It's a mature product, progress is slow, and I don't even remember the last time there was a new feature I cared about. It's the same in Windows. Microsoft can't get people to upgrade from Windows 7, let alone Windows 10. RISC-V on the other hand is changing incredibly quickly. There was not even one RISC-V chip or board on the market when Windows 10 came out. There is genuinely exciting new stuff coming out every 6 to 12 months. The P550 boards in the last month, The SpacemiT boards with 8 cores and RVV 1.0 with a decent amount of RAM in the middle of 2024. The 64 core 128 GB RAM Pioneer in January 2024. The TH1520 boards with OoO and high performance RVV 0.7 in mid 2023. The JH7110 boards, the first cheap multi-core, in January 2023. I, and many others, prefer to get new hardware the instant it comes out of the fab in mass production, even if there will always be some rough edges. But you don't have to do that. No one is forcing you. You can wait a little until others (whether in the manufacturer's staff or not) have smoothed off the edges.
- snvzz 2y ago
  You can have a u-boot in the SPI that supports usb boot. You can also have the experimental UEFI (edk2) image in the SPI.
- snvzz 2y ago
  You might be interested in latest update[0] on VF2 edk2 effort. 0. https://youtu.be/PG4FrPDTUWA?t=348 https://youtu.be/PG4FrPDTUWA?t=348