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?
They’re mostly in SBCs and dev systems right now. I know StarFive makes RISC V SBCs, and I think Pine64 has a RISC V tablet and SBC available. It’s all pretty low end and intended for dev work from what I can tell though
BeagleBone has two RISCV SBC recently. One uses a chip from Microchip which is partially an FPGA also, and the other one uses a chip from a Chinese company
Most of them are embedded into stuff like storage controllers for SSDs (Western Digital is using RISC-V for all future storage controllers) or server chips, but you can get development boards on Alibaba which are at best similar or just ahead of the Raspberry pi4 atm
i dont even know how to get a risc v processor
They’re mostly in SBCs and dev systems right now. I know StarFive makes RISC V SBCs, and I think Pine64 has a RISC V tablet and SBC available. It’s all pretty low end and intended for dev work from what I can tell though
Pine64 sells single board computers with Risc-V
BeagleBone has two RISCV SBC recently. One uses a chip from Microchip which is partially an FPGA also, and the other one uses a chip from a Chinese company
Most of them are embedded into stuff like storage controllers for SSDs (Western Digital is using RISC-V for all future storage controllers) or server chips, but you can get development boards on Alibaba which are at best similar or just ahead of the Raspberry pi4 atm
There are now some ESP32 modules that are RISC-V rather than Xtensa.