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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

#241

Post by brucehoult »

giantrobot wrote: post #213
FullyFunctional wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The older HiFive Unleashed (1.5 GHz single-issue) builds things considerably faster on a per-core basis than qemu-system on current amd64 (or at least did in the Skylake generation). The dual-issue cores in the HiFive Unmatched should be around 50% faster.

amd64 machines do have the advantage that you can get them with 32 or 64 cores and hundreds of GB of RAM -- at a price, especially in power consumption.

The three year old HiFive Unleashed uses around 5W to 6W at the wall when building flat out, considerably less than the maybe 25W a quad core i7 or Ryzen will use, with lower performance running qemu-system.

The new HiFive Unmatched probably has the same or lower power consumption, at 50% higher performance.

Running qemu on a Pi 4 would use about the same power as the RISC-V chip but be waaaaaaay slower.

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

#242

Post by nomel »

stormbrew wrote: post #238
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.

> have multiple ethernet ports

Could you say more about the use case you have in mind?

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

#243

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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.

I disable swap. If I run out of RAM, thrashing may occur but it is not fatal. Some process that needs to write to "disk" might fail, but the system does not. I just delete some file(s) to free up the needed RAM, restart the process and continue working. I don't think NetBSD has anything like "OOM killer".

Note that one drawback with "disk-less" via read-only SD card or USB stick is how to have a good source of entropy at boot time.

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

#244

Post by Teever »

nomel wrote: post #242
stormbrew wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> have multiple ethernet ports Could you say more about the use case you have in mind?

I would imagine that a person who wants multiple ethernet ports on an SBC would be interested using the SBC as a router or firewall.

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

#245

Post by guidoism »

stormbrew wrote: post #238
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.

Several of the boards from Friendly ELEC have dual ethernet: https://www.friendlyarm.com

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

#246

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

knorker wrote: post #237
znpy wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"I've found that turning of overcommit avoids this problem."

("tuning of" or "turning off")

Do you mean something like

   sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=2

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

#247

Post by monocasa »

jandrese wrote: post #217
jschwartzi wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you're asking for does exist in the industrial market (and I'm skeptical of those 'industrial' branded sandisk cards). They still use pseudo SLC (storing one bit in every flash cell as 00(0) or 11(1) and correcting up or down on read back). They also will work with you so you can track BOM changes as they internally change the cards so you can track failure rates. They also give you access to tons of internal perf counters so you can do preventative maintenance (ie. swap the card if it's getting long in the tooth). They also just generally treat you as a business partner rather than a consumer, wrt support and what have you.

It costs a pretty penny though. $40 for a 2GB non micro card was the last quote I got.

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

#248

Post by k_sze »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #246
knorker wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I've found that turning of overcommit avoids this problem." ("tuning of" or "turning off") Do you mean something like sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=2

The grand parent maybe meant “turning off”. One could argue that’s the ultimate “tuning”. :P

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

#249

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

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 you want sata then your best bet is probably the Intel NUC. Still fairly small but as powerful as your average laptop.

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

#250

Post by unwind »

brucehoult wrote: post #232
unwind wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes sense and sounds logical, but (and I'm certainly no historian) didn't the Raspberry Pi debut at a low price?
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