RISC-V Mainboard

Just for your information:

Fedora has RISC-V as a kind of non-official port. I posted the news article link above to a RISC-V thread on the Fedora devel@ mailing list. It’s to discuss if it’s time to prepare to add the RISC-V CPU to Fedora’s build system as an official port. And here is a RISC-V thread on Fedora Discussion Forum as a reference.

Debian has also RISC-V (riscv64) as one of the non-official ports.

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My desktop is a HiFive Unmatched running OpenBSD and to be honest, it’s a very long way from being usable as a daily driver for most people. The performance is just not good enough for the average person. It’s fine for messing around in Xterm, or for some light tasks and Netsurf, but any modern web browser would crush it, even if there was a functioning port of them to RISCV. I do know that there are newer boards than the Unmatched, but have not tried them.

The other issue I see here is stability, both in terms of hardware and support. Even the ISA is not set in stone yet, and there’s a good chance that all the various non-standard extensions to it will cause incompatibility between different RISCV boards from different manufacturers. Plus, the BIOS on these things is not the most stable. It is very finicky, and that would be a negative experience for most people.

Despite all that, I do think this is a good chance for someone like SiFive to make a Framework compatible motherboard for people who want to tinker with it in their laptop, which will iron out the bugs until it’s ready for the general public. In fact, it’s worth reaching out to them and asking if they’d consider it. There’s no reason Framework has to be the only one building motherboards for FW laptops–that’s the whole point.

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Pine64 just started collecting preorders for Pinetab-V, a RISC-V powered tablet :tada:

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This is a big step for a thriving RISC-V ecosystem to be a first-class CPU.

The project site: https://riseproject.dev/

Some media articles:

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Here is a great achievement for Fedora to support RISC-V as a first class.

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https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RISC-V

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