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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

#231

Post by mbreese »

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.

RPI 4 -- the original revision. Whenever I ran it off the "official" power supply, I got disk errors. As soon as I moved over to a powered USB hub, I had no other issues. This was also with a keyboard and mouse plugged in, so maybe that had something to do with it.

I was also trying to run it as a NAS, so it had a decent amount of IO.

Maybe it could have been fixed with a better power supply, but switching over to the powered hub was easier to figure out.

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

#232

Post by brucehoult »

unwind wrote: post #150
brucehoult wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Existing and shipping at all is the first step. Low price comes later, with volume.

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

#233

Post by monocasa »

stragies wrote: post #159
monocasa wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They've been delivering that vacuous promise every few years. Being bought by Canyon Bridge, a private equity fund owned by the Chinese government, a few years ago has unfortunately not changed anything.

Totally.

Having reverse engineered a bit of the drivers, I think it's because they culturally think that all of their value add is in the software. Patents have expired on the TBDR fixed function hardware blocks. The rest is just a combo of a little RISC core that does job dispatch (Programmable Data Sequencer in their parlance), and a cluster of SMT barrel scheduled cores (used to be called USSE in the SGX days, not sure now) that do the heavy lifting wrt shaders that don't really have any secret sauce AFAICT.

The value add is all in the software stack where they run a full little ukernel on the main GPU cores, and optimizing the shit out of the software that runs on those cores from their pretty clever compiler.

I bet they think that if they open source the drivers, that's giving away the one thing that makes PowerVR GPUs special in the first place.

If a IMG person reads this: y'all are wrong with that last piece. Your company is dying without opening the drivers, and you'll be able to control the hardware/software co-design in a way that nobody else can even if you give away the software. You'll have to keep doing work to have new hardware available and stay ahead of the curve, but that's true anyways and is the sign of a healthy business. Sure beats withering away as your patents expire.

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

#234

Post by brucehoult »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #148
sradman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cl…

Imagination have said they're open-sourcing the drivers for the GPU on another RISC-V board that's supposed to be coming soon (PicoRio).

Probably those work here too.

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

#235

Post by saagarjha »

brucehoult wrote: post #98
hajile wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main difference is that RISC-V is a lot more modular, so it's going to be difficult to distribute binaries for but more flexible if you're doing something completely vertical. Also a lot of the modules have bundle relatively common/easy instructions with niche/difficult ones. E.g. multiply with divide. I don't think it'll be worse than ARM and it's decidedly better than x86. There are SEVEN major revisions of A…

Do you have a reason to think the matrix instructions in the M1 are not those specified in Armv8.6-A?

They're proprietary.

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

#236

Post by brucehoult »

eclipseo76 wrote: post #211
rwmj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fedora have been shipping on RISC-V for about three years already. Last I saw, around 95% of packages work. The main exceptions have been thing that need some JIT that hasn't been ported yet -- gcc and llvm have been working for years.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V

Same for Debian, where the percentage of packages that build on RISC-V is second only to ppc64 out of the "minor" ISAs. https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-ports-week.png

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

#237

Post by knorker »

znpy wrote: post #223
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The OOM killer makes running out of memory on Linux not fun. I've found that turning of overcommit avoids this problem.

Then again, I've seen BSDs handle it even worse.

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

#238

Post by stormbrew »

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…

My pet peeve about all these small single board computers is that none of them have multiple ethernet ports, which severely limits their usefulness as networking hardware. They'd otherwise be very well suited to being various kinds of packet routing appliances.

You can sometimes hang a usb ethernet dongle off them but performance on those tend to be somewhat limited.

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

#239

Post by Tyr42 »

pedrocr wrote: post #212
jononor wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The solution I'm going for (for a similar problem, reading moisture from multiple plants on one esp8266) is tying the outputs from all the sensors together, and only turning on one at a time

Like this guy:

https://github.com/sfgabe/custom_scripts/blob/master/plant_m...

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

#240

Post by jstgord »

Does anyone have informed opinion about the usability / value / relevance / quality of the Neural network support on this chip ?

Their page mentions spec with :

    • SiFive U74 RISC-V Dual core with 2MB L2 cache @ 1.5GHz
    • Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision
    • NVDLA Engine (configuration 2048 MACs@800MHz )
    • Neural Network Engine (1024MACs@500MHz)
So this board seems to have some great support for neural net / robotics processing ?

I have just noticed the recent trend of neural hardware support on mainstream chips... Apples M1, this chip.

Wondering what the implications are for software and user-space .. what kind of devices / apps will this enable ?

One area Im interested in is turning lidar scanner point data into 3D geometry on the device, thus solving a big data management issue.

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