Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
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Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#2First tests of RISC-V laptop reveal a number of software and hardware issues, but show a path to freedom.
Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#3> apt update fetches packages from Chinese server
So is it not official Debian? If so, that’s concerning!
Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#4I have one of these as well - the distro I installed has a broken Chrome that crashes shortly after startup, hopefully that's fixed now.
The case is prototype-quality but fine (the fact that it's metal helps a lot), the screen is nice, the keyboard is even more awkward than it needs to be for the size.
I've been a bit disappointed by the performance in my tests (compiling various projects of mine with GCC), it seems closer to a Raspberry Pi 3 than a 4 or 5.
Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#5My question: is it bootable into Linux without the use of any binary blobs? That is, can it be booted essentially equivalent to a librebooted system?
Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#6My question: is it bootable into Linux without the use of any binary blobs? That is, can it be booted essentially equivalent to a librebooted system?
Proooobably? I've written bare-metal bootloaders for RISC-V chips (though running seL4 and not Linux) and there's a _lot_ less stuff in the startup process than on x86/x64.
Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#7> apt update fetches packages from Chinese server So is it not official Debian? If so, that’s concerning!
I interpreted it as "the default apt server is the official Chinese mirror"
Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#8> apt update fetches packages from Chinese server So is it not official Debian? If so, that’s concerning!
I interpreted it as "the default apt server is the official Chinese mirror" https://www.debian.org/mirror/list http://ftp.cn.debian.org/debian/
Yep. Or it could be official Debian + some specific packages, a bit like Mobian.
Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#9My question: is it bootable into Linux without the use of any binary blobs? That is, can it be booted essentially equivalent to a librebooted system?
Proooobably? I've written bare-metal bootloaders for RISC-V chips (though running seL4 and not Linux) and there's a _lot_ less stuff in the startup process than on x86/x64.
That is great to hear, actually! Thank you.
Re: Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues
#10I have one of these as well - the distro I installed has a broken Chrome that crashes shortly after startup, hopefully that's fixed now. The case is prototype-quality but fine (the fact that it's metal helps a lot), the screen is nice, the keyboard is even more awkward than it needs to be for the size. I've been a bit disappointed by the performance in my tests (compiling various projects of mine with GCC), it seems…
I think it's mostly a case of software not being optimized for RISC-V. The sipeed website indicates that it's much faster if the benchmarks are built with optimized toolchains.
I imagine it has x64 or arm7 emulator for most builds.