Ubuntu continues expanding RISC-V support – now, the $17 Sipeed LicheeRV Canonical has brought its Ubuntu Linux operating system to another RISC-V system: this week, Sipeed's LicheeRV single board computer. The announcement marks the software house's latest investment in the open, royalty-free ISA. To date, Ubuntu runs on numerous RISC-V systems, including those from SiFive, Clockwork, Microchip, …
"...not too happy about Allwinner"
Allwinner is scum.
They'll take the LInux kernel and chop it up then add in a whole bunch of proprietary modules to the hardware so anything even clone to mainline is simply not an option. Just guessing but, if it wasn't for Alibaba buying some of their hardware I don't think they'd exist so, good luck with any future support.
They're not scum.
"They'll take the LInux kernel and chop it up then add in a whole bunch of proprietary modules to the hardware so anything even clone to mainline is simply not an option. Just guessing but, if it wasn't for Alibaba buying some of their hardware I don't think they'd exist so, good luck with any future support."
This is the chinese way. Most of the stuff they produce is half arsed or buggy or wont meet the spec but their culture (not race) says that this is acceptable. For instance one of their SUNX devices - hardware crypto - dubiious - CPU speed and power management forget about it - core features that just don't work.
I will never buy from China again
To state the obvious; tech's always a tandem of software and hardware, and to some extent it's the software that's the harder bit to deliver. Several OSs have been working on RISC-V for a while now - I presume they include apps such as a file manager and terminal - and there are numerous developer boards, including from SiFive, T-Head and Huawei, as well as the recently announced ROMA laptop, for software developers to work on the platform itself.
But what's interesting now is the advent of boards like Sipeed's Nezha, StarFive's VisionFive 2 and Pine64's Star64, which seem to be putting RISC-V into the hands of the techie consumer. Are the fundamental, necessary apps rebased for RISC-V now? Browser, office suite, etc.? (I also hear rumours of a phone coming out soon.) As Tobais Mann notes; these boards take the competition to the RaspberryPi Foundation who, to date, haven't shown any interest at all in RISC-V.
There are also much more powerful RISC-V processors due out next year.
> Are the fundamental, necessary apps rebased for RISC-V now? Browser, office suite, etc.?
Browsers or office suite I suspect will not be a problem. ASSuming that all drivers underlying API's are in place for access the network stack, graphics and storage.
Where I would expect problems would be in something like VLC which uses codecs, most of which use custom hand written assembly for maximum performance e.g. dav1d for AOMedia Video 1 aka AV1 playback has optimised SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) assembly code for arm, x86 and power but no public RISC-V assembly (yet). That does not mean that it will not function, just that it will probably fall back to using generic (suboptimal) code.
People do not generally write code for hardware that they do not own, so there is always going to be the chicken and egg scenario with new hardware and software being created.
If you look at a SoC like the JH7110 (4 x U74 & 1 x S7 CPUs) used in the VisionFive 2 (StarFive) and Star64 (Pine64) boards. The RISC-V part will probably work fine since the chip uses SiFive IP which has previously been used in the SiFive unleashed (Freedom U540 SoC - 4 x U54 & 1 x E51 CPUs) and SiFive unmatched (Freedom U740 SoC - 4 x U74 & 1 x S7 CPUs). The U54 and U74 are close enough in general terms that if you have the boot process for one, it will work for the other. The real problems will never be the RISC-V part of the equation it is everything else, especially any IP used in a SoC that involves NDA's and blobs. The JH7110 from current publicly published information appears relatively free from NDA's - but that is just it, Non Disclosure Agreements make it so that would always appear to be the case.
Raspberry Pi Foundation are a hardware agnostic education charity. They do not develop hardware, they don’t even necessarily use Raspberry Pi devices to achieve their charity goals. They could choose to cover RISC V without conflict of imterest.
Out of curiosity I purchased a Mango Pi SBC. It is has 1GB RAM and runs armbian Linux, it is also based on AllWinner D1, and was under £20 delivered from China. It’s for fun only, I could do what I have done with it on a Qemu emulation but still good to play with.
I'll wait for somebody other than AllWInner to make these. I *have* programmed RISC-V barebones and it was a lot of fun. It is reminiscent of the old IBM 360 series.
Only 512 MB minus putting Ubuntu in there, means just a headless configuration. But there are plenty of applications in that space.
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