Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

beaglev.seeed.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 311 posts

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

#201

Post by moftz »

cjbconnor wrote: post #69
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?

Nearly all SD cards that I've used in Pis and other SBCs have died unpredictably in the past, so I've pretty much given up on using them

I have a special SD card made up that has all of the correct boot configs set and a small script to update everything and set up the Pi for PXE boot. After everything is configured, I take out the SD card and let it just pull boot images over the network. My main home server serves everything up over tftp. The only downside is that you can't get this to work over wifi. The wifi Pis get read only SD cards that are all configured the same so it's easy to reimage a new one if the card dies.

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

#202

Post by ansible »

spurdoman77 wrote: post #167

Why the linux boards are always designed to be cheap? What about those who have little more dough and are willing to put some cash to get extra? Just create some expensiver premium models, not only cheap stuff, damn it.

HiFive Unmatched has up to 16GB of RAM:

https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched

But it is a little pricey.

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

#204

Post by ansible »

drewm1980 wrote: post #93
ansible wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything about RISC-V that is "better" simply because it is a later design than others? A lot of it is because it is newer, and the designers have learned from previous architectures. It is a relatively clean and straightforward instruction set, designed to be easily and efficiently implemented. There's not anything that is super crazy revolutionary, in contrast to the (still vaporware) Mill CPU architectu…

The mill has been in development for... 18 ~years now! Soon they will be able to hire engineers who are actually younger than the company. I wonder if there has ever been a tech company that survived so long without bringing a product to market. Duke Nukem Forever took ~14 years.

From what I understand, all the developers have day jobs or are independently wealthy and can afford to work on it without (much?) pay. They haven't accepted VC money, even though that would likely have sped up development considerably.

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

#206

Post by nickwanninger »

joshlk wrote: post #203

What features makes it “designed for Linux”?

Likely that it supports the Supervisor execution environment from the riscv spec [1]. This means it can run the typical ring 0 and ring 3 for kernelspace and userspace respectively, and importantly the board supports virtual memory.

[1] https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/riscv-privilege...

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

#207

Post by mhh__ »

drewm1980 wrote: post #93
ansible wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything about RISC-V that is "better" simply because it is a later design than others? A lot of it is because it is newer, and the designers have learned from previous architectures. It is a relatively clean and straightforward instruction set, designed to be easily and efficiently implemented. There's not anything that is super crazy revolutionary, in contrast to the (still vaporware) Mill CPU architectu…

The mill has been in development for... 18 ~years now! Soon they will be able to hire engineers who are actually younger than the company. I wonder if there has ever been a tech company that survived so long without bringing a product to market. Duke Nukem Forever took ~14 years.

According to Ivan on their forums (so take this with a grain of salt as it's from the horses mouth rather than an external assessment) they were apparently supposed to be levelling-up in the summer of 2020.

They have at least secured a decent patent portfolio, particularly on the belt.

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

#208

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

On the systems I can control, I do all work "disk-less". I strongly prefer it. I like to keep programs and data segregated. The basic setup on NetBSD is as follows, with endless variations possible therefrom. The kernel(s) and userland(s), along with bootloader(s), are on external media, like an SD card or USB stick, marked read-only. There's a RAM-disk in the kernel with a multi-call binary-based userland (custom-made using BusyBox or crunchgen). After boot, a full userland from external media or the network is mounted on tmpfs-based or mfs-based overlay and then we chroot into the full userland. From there, the work space is all tmpfs (RAM).^1 I can experiment to heart's content without jeopardising the ability to reboot into a clean slate. The "user experience" is also much faster than with disk-based. Any new "data" that is to be retained for future use across reboots is periodically saved to some USB or Ethernet connected storage media. I do not use "cloud" for personal data. Sorry. This forces me to think carefully about what needs to be saved and what is just temporary. It helps prevent the accumulation of cruft. The number one benefit of this for me though is that I can recover from a crash instantly and without an internet connection. No dependencies on any corporation.

This BeagleV looks like it would work well for me as it has Ethernet and USB ports.

1. With NetBSD, I can run out of memory with no major problems. With Linux, this has not been the case. I have to be more careful.

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

#209

Post by novok »

megous wrote: post #193
cjbconnor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all SD cards that I've used in Pis and other SBCs have died unpredictably in the past, so I've pretty much given up on using them

Using f2fs and setting up the SW on my SBCs to not write data needlessly to SD card all the time (some programs are really bad at this), and having a very high quality power supply and cabling was enough to make my boards work for years on a single SD card. Some are at 4 years currently and still work fine. I'm using Sandisk only, since a few years ago, because it's the only manufacturer that allows me to verify onli…

We shouldn't have to do that or special USB boot things that don't integrate well with extra cables sticking out of the form factor.

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

#210

Post by CyberDildonics »

acehreli wrote: post #199
CyberDildonics wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their product is hardware patents.

That's patently wrong. :) I worked for the Mill for a while The Mill is as real as it gets. EDIT: No, there is no actual CPU but the software, the compiler, the simulator, etc. exist.

Where does their income come from? When is the CPU going to be released?
Post reply on HN