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BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

beaglev.seeed.cc

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Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#131

Post by nickik »

pjc50 wrote: post #107
tyingq wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the real world "No percentage of each sale payments to ARM" is what will drive RISC-V. An "open" ISA doesn't force anything else to be open. So, use cases like Western Digital, where they can quit paying ARM a percentage of every hard drive they sell, for example. As for technical advantages, each RISCV vendor has their own choice of how to implement, so it's hard to say anything broad that applies to all…

> quit paying ARM a percentage The percentage is very small, though. So this argument only works for very high volume use cases, which is why the RISC-V eval boards are currently far more expensive than comparable ARMs. Do WD do their own silicon yet, or do they just buy the parts?

WD has their own cores and they are OpenSource. Very nice designs. They also spend a lot of money on the open source ecosystem for chip development.

See:

- https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovations/risc-v

- https://chipsalliance.org/

- https://github.com/chipsalliance/Cores-SweRV

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#132

Post by monocasa »

pabs3 wrote: post #62
archanox wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per the Ars link; > The initial pilot run of BeagleV will use the Vision DSP hardware as a graphics processor, allowing a full graphical desktop environment under Fedora. Following hardware runs will include an unspecified model of Imagine GPU as well.

Also, ImgTec are planning on writing and upstreaming open drivers for Linux and mesa for another RISC-V based board, so probably those drivers will work here too. https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/picorio-the-raspberry-pi-like...

I don't think that necessarily says that ImgTec will be upstreaming the open drivers, more that they don't have a better option at the moment and will be replacing closed source components with each revision.

I hope they will, but I'll believe it when I see it. They've been extremely allergic to open source in the past.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#133

Post by samstave »

sradman wrote: post #67
basher wrote: post #13

Arstechnica coverage: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/seeed-and-beagleboar...

> Although the first hardware run will be entirely $140 / 8GiB systems, lower-cost variants with less RAM are expected in following releases. > The initial pilot run of BeagleV will use the Vision DSP hardware as a graphics processor, allowing a full graphical desktop environment under Fedora. Following hardware runs will include an unspecified model of Imagine GPU as well. Sounds like a direct competitor to the Rasp…

>>*SiFive is strategically leveraging or responding to the geopolitics surrounding Chinese technology.*

interesting subtext.

We should all be debating HW WRT the fact that you can't name a single device (aside from weapons) that does not contain a single-non-chinese-manufactured component...

every phone or machine is almost 100% chinese built.

"designed by apple in cupertino california" (but made with slave labor from congo, china and other countries)

And we already know about all the backdoors both China and the US do...

FFS we have known about Eschelon since the 70s - the carnivor, room 641A, etc... etc....

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#134

Post by my123 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #114
my123 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The high-level design is proprietary too. As I said elsewhere, SiFive CPUs are just as closed as Arm ones, you just pay a royalty to SiFive instead of Arm.

> The high-level design is proprietary too. They have source code files for their 'Freedom' core designs up on GitHub under an Apache 2.x license. These can be directly used to evaluate their designs as FPGA soft-cores.

The SoC, with the Rocket core used. This is very different from SiFive's own U series cores, which are proprietary.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#135

Post by my123 »

sitkack wrote: post #124
my123 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The high-level design is proprietary too. As I said elsewhere, SiFive CPUs are just as closed as Arm ones, you just pay a royalty to SiFive instead of Arm.

They aren't for the customers of SiFive. What is your greater point with this comment? That SiFive isn't Open Source or that they are equivalent to Arm? This video from SiFive clearly explains the RISC-V ecosystem and how SiFive is involved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmGIJMYwWNw

Arm provides Verilog source code of their CPU cores for their customers. It's an industry standard practice.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#136

Post by pedrocr »

monocasa wrote: post #128
pedrocr wrote: post #105

> All GPIOs can be configured to different functions including but not limited to SDIO, Audio, SPI, I2C, UART and PWM Does supporting audio mean that these GPIOs can be used as analog-to-digital converters? There are home automation applications where reading a voltage in an ethernet connected device is a good fit but from what I've seen in a raspberry that requires extra hardware connected to the IO ports.

It probably means I2S.

Makes sense. Just another digital bus. Bummer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C2%B2S

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#137

Post by tubularhells »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #91
mrweasel wrote: post #53

Is there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA/M.2 port to board like this? The RaspberryPi is also "disk-less", which to me is one of the major limitations. It's a super interesting little board, and I love that it's a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don't know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card…

Why would you need SATA when you have SD, also USB3 and Gigabit Ethernet? I have no problem booting from the SD then accessing data on my SATA drives using a USB-attached controller, also plan to get a NAS. Sure, it would be great to have connectors for everything and support for every cool standard but these guys have to give up all what is non-essential to keep it small, cheap and possible to engineer by a small te…

Because he wants to run a file server from it. This too was my first question.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#138

Post by bradfa »

TrueDuality wrote: post #115

I've been unable to use Beagle boards in the past as they ship with an old kernel and uboot without the sources to update or config them (this was specifically with the black variant). It probably had something to do with vendor NDAs with chipsets or something but it made them entirely unusable to me and more expensive than competitors by almost 2x to boot. I would love a RISC-V board to play with that is a bit more…

I've never had this problem with Beagle Boards and sources. Sure the kernel or u-boot that ship with them might be slightly older but sources have always been available.

And TI are quite decent at contributing to the upstream kernel and u-boot trees. Generally only a few months after a new TI SoC is announced there's enough support in the upstream u-boot and kernel to boot the board and do some useful things. Generally by the time silicon is buyable by mere mortals mainline is in pretty decent shape.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#139

Post by zozbot234 »

my123 wrote: post #134
zozbot234 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The high-level design is proprietary too. They have source code files for their 'Freedom' core designs up on GitHub under an Apache 2.x license. These can be directly used to evaluate their designs as FPGA soft-cores.

The SoC, with the Rocket core used. This is very different from SiFive's own U series cores, which are proprietary.

SiFive has E-series (aka "Freedom Everywhere") and U-series (aka "Freedom Unleashed") cores, both of which seem to be based on Rocket. And they do provide high-level designs for both on their GitHub, under a free license.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#140

Post by stjohnswarts »

jwandborg wrote: post #71
lsb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get an SD card with 0.5TB capacity on it for USD$30, what storage needs do you foresee? Also these tend to be used where weight is an issue, so, why do you want to lug around a huge disk?

An M.2 SSD is not huge. In my experience, SD cards are way slower than SSDs for random access operations.

compiling on SSD is so slow. I once compiled an rpi kernel on rpi just for fun and it took forever. Cross compiling is the only way to go for now, unless you only have a small project.
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