Introducing a new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing

[Alan_Pearce]

@NM64

One thing in particular that caught my attention is the only m.2 slot is dedicated to wifi and they’re using a microSD slot and a sort of defacto-standard eMMC socket for storage (and, of course, many Linux distros can be installed onto USB as well).

See my post over here for a possible way to do it.

[NM64]

Another thought I just had—around 5 years ago, m.2 SATA SSDs were pretty common. Why not add a SATA-only m.2 slot? Or is the issue that SATA still requires PCIe lane(s) due to SATA presumably not being natively integrated into the SOC directly?

@Adrian_Joachim

M.2 is a connector with multiple different pinouts, the keys are both to tell you what kind it is and prevent you from plugging the wrong thing into the wrong port.

NVMe and wifi are both just PCIe devices, and so the m.2 connector is simply being used as a smaller version of the bog-standard PCIe slot you find on desktop motherboards or the like (even more-so since I don’t believe any Framework mainboards support m.2 SATA SSDs).

There was already another user that repurposed their wifi slot on the x86 Framework 13 mainboard for their SSD in order to use the main NVMe slot for an external GPU and it all “just worked”… at least on Linux:

How to boot framework from external SSD enclosure

I am attempting to add an egpu to an AMD mainboard through the m.2 port generally reserved for the nvme SSD. The mainboard is in a cooler master case and did not come from a laptop. I have a Samsung 990 pro with both ubuntu and Windows partitions. What I eventually want is for the computer to always boot from the exteranl SSD(plugged into top right usb4.0 port) once it has been moved into an external case. For background I installed windows first, created a free partition then installed Ubuntu …

[Adrian_Joachim]

@NM64

Or is the issue that SATA still requires PCIe lane(s) due to SATA presumably not being natively integrated into the SOC directly?

Sata does require sata, some socs do provide that directly or you can convert pcie or usb or something into it.

@NM64

There was already another user that repurposed their wifi slot on the x86 Framework 13 mainboard for their SSD in order to use the main NVMe slot for an external GPU and it all “just worked”… at least on Linux:

You can easily, you just need an adabter that wires the 1 pcie lane for the wifi to the e-key pinout. You can do that pretty much anywhere pcie wifi cards are used (some devices use the same chipset with just the proprietary intel wifi protocol and no pcie).

[D.H]

Is the RISC-V chip on this Mainboard affected by this vulnerability? The article mentions a specific RISC-V based chip, but stops short of commenting on whether it affects all chips implementing this architecture or not…

GhostWrite Vulnerability Affects RISC-V CPU, Mitigating Takes A ~77%...

[Alan_Pearce]

Haven’t looked at that article, but have a read of this one. which explains the problem quite clearly. It only affects a chinese sourced chip family.

[Peter_Clapham]

Wow,
this is a very interesting step, particularly with the way that power demands are growing.

I’d love to see a framework laptop with one of these RISC units:https://www.fujitsu.com/global/imagesgig5/FUJITSU-MONAKA.pdf

pcie6, CXL3, high bandwidth and performant memory with reduced power draw and optimised IO.

Looking forward to seeing you guys deliver