Lately I’ve been really liking the idea of having something hosted on a RISC-V
machine. RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is a competitor to
ARM. The idea of having a something running on an open source operating system,
running on an open standard CPU, served from my house, gives me a warm fuzzy
feeling. I was under the impression that most Linux distributions were unstable
on RISC-V. Turns out, I’m wrong about that. From a quick search, the following
have official Debian images: * Beagleboard Beagle-V Ahead
[https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead] * Starfive Visionfive 2
[https://ameridroid.com/products/visionfive-2] * Milk-V Mars
[https://milkv.io/mars] and the Pine64 Star64
[https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/] has a community-maintained Armbian
image. Does anyone here have a RISC-V single-board computer doing anything
practical for you?
RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is an alternative to ARM. I had thought that we were still waiting for a stable Linux distribution on RISC-V devices, but it turns out many RISC-V machines can run Debian already.
Does anyone have a RISC-V device that they use regularly? How has it been working?
Definitely interested - is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?
I’ve been bitten before with a device that “supports” a major distribution, but only if you install our custom pre-built image (good luck auditing what we’ve tweaked) and only with our special pre-built kernel that isn’t even an LTS version, and has a bunch of patches applied to support whatever weird peripherals we decided to throw on the board, and will get exactly 0 updates after the initial release.
Raspberry Pi gets around this by being big enough to get buy in from vendors (Ubuntu distributes a special kernel + firmware bundle), but support for all the other smaller knock offs seem shaky at best
Definitely interested - is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?
I’ve been bitten before with a device that “supports” a major distribution, but only if you install our custom pre-built image (good luck auditing what we’ve tweaked) and only with our special pre-built kernel that isn’t even an LTS version, and has a bunch of patches applied to support whatever weird peripherals we decided to throw on the board, and will get exactly 0 updates after the initial release.
Raspberry Pi gets around this by being big enough to get buy in from vendors (Ubuntu distributes a special kernel + firmware bundle), but support for all the other smaller knock offs seem shaky at best