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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

#211

Post by eclipseo76 »

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.

> We will likely buy a pile of them to do Fedora builds.

Do you expect a lot of things to break on RISCV?

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

#212

Post by pedrocr »

jononor wrote: post #183
pedrocr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really want audio. What I'm looking for is to read 3.3V or 5V analog levels, with really low frequency, once a second or less would be fine.

Many cheap and easy to interface I2C and SPI chips for that, which is the way the industry is going generally. Or throw in a tiny Arduino with stock Firmata firmware, and use that as an I/O extender.

That's the extra hardware I mentioned. I guess I wish the RPi just included one of those chips and had say 4 to 8 pins for ADC. It would make things simpler versus having to find something already well integrated or building it.

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

#213

Post by giantrobot »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #179
giantrobot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sure the Fedora builds aren't designed for cross compilation (which is far from trivial for most packages not designed for it). Also, man-power is the most precious resource so it would be a waste to spend time trying to cross-compile what could be built natively.

As long as you've got the target toolchain on the host, the code has no idea it's being cross compiled. If you've got the tooling set up it's a lot of setting of envars. It's not trivial but it's also not super difficult. A compiler running native on an architecture doesn't produce any different output than the same compiler doing a cross compilation.

Even if you wanted to run a native RISC-V build process, running it in QEMU on a much more powerful AMD64 system will get you the same results in a fraction of the time. This gets much faster feedback in the CI system.

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

#214

Post by colejohnson66 »

cogman10 wrote: post #120
qwerty456127 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly I just wish there was a faster standard than SD. 100MB/s for solid state is just incredibly slow now-a-days. There's no reason you couldn't kick SD transfer speeds up towards SSD speeds other than the protocol doesn't allow for it.

CFast is CompactFlash, but with a SATA-based interface (up to ~600 MByte/sec) instead of IDE. It was designed because video cameras were making too much data for CF to handle. The downside is its size: 43x36x5 mm vs 15x11x1 mm for microSD.

Also, CFast aren’t as ubiquitous as microSD. I can go to Target or Walmart and get a wide “selection” of microSD, but I’d be hard pressed to find a CFast card. So the chances of an SBC using CFast over eMMC or microSD is low.

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

#215

Post by jandrese »

edsouza wrote: post #160
mrweasel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little costly, but I guess development of a board like that isn't cheap.

The board has 16GB DDR4 memory on board, that's probably one of the most costly components.

16GB DDR4 2400 DIMMs run about $67 retail. So about 1/10 of the total cost of that board. It's a little apples and oranges, but since it seems like they just plucked down the same 8 chips you'd find on a DIMM right to the board maybe not that much.

I note that it has a PCIe x8 slot, but they don't have drivers for a video card (or any card) yet so it's kinda useless.

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

#216

Post by jandrese »

mceachen wrote: post #130
happimess wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm certainly no expert, but I've never been able to run a spinning disk HDD off of a raspberry pi without a powered USB hub. I imagine the thermals and form factor would be hurt pretty badly by including a plausible power supply.

Try a higher-quality power supply for your RPi.

Honestly even with a high quality supply I'd tend to prefer if the drive were externally powered. I have flashbacks to the first generation Pis that would brownout and reboot if you plugged in a mouse or keyboard while it was running.

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

#217

Post by jandrese »

jschwartzi wrote: post #182
monocasa wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically they end up being really different. SD Cards end up being bottom of the barrel flash chips (even from the 'good' brands), whereas eMMC uses flash good enough that you can count on it being non replaceable. You want "industrial" cards from a vendor tailored to the space. I wouldn't trust even those new industrial sandisk cards.

Yeah as someone who has deployed SD-based and eMMC-based systems in industrial spaces, SD cards are hot garbage compared to eMMC and I would strongly recommend not using them in anything that needs to be reliable.

There should be a market for people who will pay extra for SD cards that:

1. Absolutely don't lie about their capacity

2. Have a reasonable MTBF

3. Are reliably fast

But instead we're all dealing with an industry that raced to the bottom years ago.

I'm concerned that the same mentality will infect the eMMC market eventually and it will become impossible to find quality parts after a couple of years.

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

#218

Post by jandrese »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #140
jwandborg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Raspberry Pis tend to be skimpy on memory. If it starts swapping it's going to be slow even on a fast SSD.

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

#219

Post by TimSchumann »

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…

If I had to guess, and this is just a guess, so take it with a grain of salt. I'd bet most storage devices these days are just thin wrappers around PCI-Express lanes, most of the hardware in the silicon running that stuff is on die for AMD/Intel CPU's and you likely run into cost/power/board space limitations in a device like this

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

#220

Post by jandrese »

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…

The board I have has only 4GB of MMC on board which wasn't big enough for the later versions of the OS, but you could boot off of the SD instead if you held down a button on the board while powering it up.

There was a way to tweak it so you didn't have to hold the button down, but it was kinda involved IIRC so I never got around to it.

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