Lately I’ve been really liking the idea of having something hosted on a RISC-V
machine. RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is a competitor to
ARM. The idea of having a something running on an open source operating system,
running on an open standard CPU, served from my house, gives me a warm fuzzy
feeling. I was under the impression that most Linux distributions were unstable
on RISC-V. Turns out, I’m wrong about that. From a quick search, the following
have official Debian images: * Beagleboard Beagle-V Ahead
[https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead] * Starfive Visionfive 2
[https://ameridroid.com/products/visionfive-2] * Milk-V Mars
[https://milkv.io/mars] and the Pine64 Star64
[https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/] has a community-maintained Armbian
image. Does anyone here have a RISC-V single-board computer doing anything
practical for you?
RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is an alternative to ARM. I had thought that we were still waiting for a stable Linux distribution on RISC-V devices, but it turns out many RISC-V machines can run Debian already.
Does anyone have a RISC-V device that they use regularly? How has it been working?
They’re mostly in SBCs and dev systems right now. I know StarFive makes RISC V SBCs, and I think Pine64 has a RISC V tablet and SBC available. It’s all pretty low end and intended for dev work from what I can tell though
BeagleBone has two RISCV SBC recently. One uses a chip from Microchip which is partially an FPGA also, and the other one uses a chip from a Chinese company
Most of them are embedded into stuff like storage controllers for SSDs (Western Digital is using RISC-V for all future storage controllers) or server chips, but you can get development boards on Alibaba which are at best similar or just ahead of the Raspberry pi4 atm
i dont even know how to get a risc v processor
Get a BeagleBoard! https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead
Edit: or a Star64! https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/
Pine64 sells single board computers with Risc-V
They’re mostly in SBCs and dev systems right now. I know StarFive makes RISC V SBCs, and I think Pine64 has a RISC V tablet and SBC available. It’s all pretty low end and intended for dev work from what I can tell though
BeagleBone has two RISCV SBC recently. One uses a chip from Microchip which is partially an FPGA also, and the other one uses a chip from a Chinese company
There are now some ESP32 modules that are RISC-V rather than Xtensa.
Most of them are embedded into stuff like storage controllers for SSDs (Western Digital is using RISC-V for all future storage controllers) or server chips, but you can get development boards on Alibaba which are at best similar or just ahead of the Raspberry pi4 atm