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

221–230 of 311 posts

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

#221

Post by adrianstoll »

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…

Samsung provides authentication software for their sd cards too.

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

#222

Post by brucehoult »

jandrese wrote: post #215
edsouza wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have been running Radeon graphics cards with Linux desktop and the open source driver on the predecessor HiFive Unleashed board for literally three years already.

SiFive demonstrates the HiFive Unmatched using a $300 150W Radeon RX580. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVsnnYuvDXI

You can complain that you don't want to spend that much on a graphics card [1] but you can't complain that it's not supported.

[1] cheaper ones will work too

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

#223

Post by znpy »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #208
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-ma…

> 1. With NetBSD, I can run out of memory with no major problems.

Could you elaborate a bit more on that, please ?

It's been a while since I last touched NetBSD, but I don't remember anything special regarding that aspect.

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

#224

Post by jandrese »

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.

Because the expensive stuff doesn't sell.

At the end of the day most of these are just toys and it's hard to justify spending $850 on a device that is less capable than a $500 mini form factor OEM box if you're doing something serious.

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

#225

Post by jandrese »

brucehoult wrote: post #222
jandrese wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have been running Radeon graphics cards with Linux desktop and the open source driver on the predecessor HiFive Unleashed board for literally three years already. SiFive demonstrates the HiFive Unmatched using a $300 150W Radeon RX580. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVsnnYuvDXI You can complain that you don't want to spend that much on a graphics card [1] but you can't complain that it's not supported. [1] ch…

Then they should probably mention that on their page, which only says that graphics cards are being planned for but not currently supported.

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

#227

Post by znpy »

hackmiester wrote: post #113
mbreese wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still need to run an SSD off of a powered hub for an RPi to use it stably.

Strange. What Pi? I’ve had a spinning 2.5” HDD connected to a Pi 3B+ for a few years now.

maybe you're running a 4200rpm disk and the other person is running a 7200rpm disk.

faster-spinning-plates would draw more power, I guess.

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

#228

Post by znpy »

adrianstoll wrote: post #221
megous wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Samsung provides authentication software for their sd cards too.

does it run on linux or do i need windows to run that? because if windows is needed then sandisk can get a chunk of my salary.

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

#229

Post by my123 »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #170
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.

This is not correct. Anyone can design and build a RISC-V CPU without ever getting permission from anyone. Anything that uses the ARM ISA on the other hand requires a (costly) licence from ARM. SiFive has its own proprietary *implementation" buty that's not required, and there are many free open source implementations.

I wrote SiFive CPUs, not RISC-V there. (because this BeagleV board uses SiFive)

There's a _huge_ gap between academic implementations and ones that are actually worth shipping. I can see RISC-V winning quite handily for microcontrollers. But on anything bigger than that...

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

#230

Post by brucehoult »

blkbjhjkl wrote: post #192
cogman10 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish folks would stop conflating boot media and root media. There's no reason your SD card has to consist of anything more than u-boot. SD is fantastically simple, so that the boot rom can get at a bootloader without much effort (generally the bootrom just looks at a memory offset on the mmc device). Once you start speaking newer faster protocols, this simplicity is lost. You're not likely going to find a bootrom t…

SD cards speak SPI. In fact SPI is all SiFive supported on their first 2018 HiFive Unleashed. As you say, it's good enough to bootstrap. That old board has gigE. Once you're up enough to TFTP you're away. I've never actually bothered to set that up on mine -- I boot a full kernel with NFS support and then switch to that.
Post reply on HN