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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

#141

Post by bsder »

tjoff wrote: post #126
tachyonbeam wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just that most people want to use the Raspberry Pi for toy projects. They're trying to keep the cost down, and to keep the board small. If you want something like micro ATX ARM motherboard, that's a different use case. The large majority of Raspberry Pi users are fine with USB 3.0 ports for I/O.

Most that are complaining about this just want something reliable. Raspberry pis are very popular as audio streamers, media centers that streams of the network, home automations etc. But all or them greatly suffer from the fact that it can randomly die on you. Which is quite frustrating. The only sensible solution (imho) to this currently is netbooting but it can be a hassle to setup in some cases. An integrated 16GB…

We have an alternative to the RPi that has an eMMC. It's called a Beaglebone.

And everybody bitches that the board is too expensive.

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

#142

Post by giantrobot »

rwmj wrote: post #46
deepGem wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just saw this SiFive board HiFive is retailing for $679, can you please comment if this is any good for toying around ? Specs look more than decent - almost desktop class computing. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched

I have a couple on order, and I've talked to one of the developers. It looks nice - PCIe, NVRAM SSDs, mini ITX format, 16GB RAM, more cores, etc - but not in the same price point or market segment as an SBC. We will likely buy a pile of them to do Fedora builds.

Why would you want use these as build machines? It seems more efficient to just cross-compile on your fastest build machines. You get much faster CI feedback that way. Obviously you want to validate RISC-V code on native devices but using them as builders seems wasteful.

I'm genuinely curious why that's desirable. Maybe I just misunderstand your comment and you want the RISC-V boards for validation i.e. make sure you can self-host the distro even if in general releases are cross-compiled on your (I assume AMD64) build fleet.

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

#143

Post by monocasa »

pedrocr wrote: post #136
monocasa wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably means I2S.

Makes sense. Just another digital bus. Bummer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C2%B2S

Eh, a decent audio DAC pretty much requires another chip since it takes up a ton of die space, so you'd be an absolute fool to use the same process node as your logic. Since this looks to be beagleboard compatible, you should be able to use an audio cape like this https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-67906/l/beagleb...

If you don't care about it being decent, you can just use the PWM channels like the RPi does.

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

#144

Post by my123 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #139
my123 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

High-level designs of the SoC, not of those cores themselves is public for some platforms.

Based on whatever for the core doesn't matter, as the cores themselves in any case diverge quite a lot from Rocket.

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

#145

Post by brucehoult »

Narishma wrote: post #110
pabs3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Anybody know what changed their mind? As I recall, they've always been pretty hostile to open source.

Apple dropping them?

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

#146

Post by sitkack »

my123 wrote: post #135
sitkack wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You haven't said anything about SiFive.

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

#147

Post by akmittal »

rwmj wrote: post #29
akmittal wrote: post #26

Most RISC-V processors use really old node sizes. Even Raspberry Pi is on 28nm. To be more efficient and complete with mainstream processors a move to 10/12nm is required.

I think everyone is well aware of that, but unless you're making and able to sell millions of boards and have hundreds of millions in cash flow, there's no real path to using 10nm or smaller nodes. FWIW AllWinner are currently manufacturing 5 million RISC-V chips (with TSMC IIRC). I don't know what node they are using.

Raspberry Pi is sold in millions but still on 28nm

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

#148

Post by rhn_mk1 »

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…

Imagination GPU :( Notorious for being hard to support in open source. I'm not even sure there was a single free driver for those.

That likely means those devices are going to be stuck on an outdated kernel, unless Imagination steps in and provides ongoing binary support for newer kernels for their GPUs like x86 GPU manufacturers do. However, this being RISC-V with 2 existing devices total, I don't count on it.

So close, yet so far.

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

#149

Post by stragies »

pabs3 wrote: post #60
stragies wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means PowerVR, most likely. Bad news, no useable drivers ever existed for mainline linux kernel for any PowerVR CPU

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...

Haven't they been promising that since about 3 years? As far as I know, that never materialized.

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

#150

Post by unwind »

brucehoult wrote: post #89
mrweasel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see a Micro-ATX og Mini-ITX board with an ARM or RISC-V CPU, with PCIe ports and storage connectors. There are ARM boards, but they're a little pricy.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched PCIe, 16 GB DDR4, two M.2 (one for storage, one WIFI), quad core 1.5 GHz (same cores as this board, but twice as many)

At $679, that's more than "a little pricey" to me at least.
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