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posted by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the chip-off-the-old...chip? dept.

Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership:

[The Raspberry Pi] Foundation has announced that it is joining the RISC-V Foundation, suggesting that a shift away from Arm could be on the cards. "We're excited to have joined the RISC-V Foundation as a silver member," the Raspberry Pi Foundation posted to its Twitter account. "[We're] hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and Debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture."

A shift from the proprietary Arm architecture to RISC-V would fit in nicely with the Foundation's goal of low-cost, highly-accessible computing for education and industry – but would put paid to its tradition of keeping backwards compatibility where possible, something it has already suggested might be the case when it moves away from the Broadcom BCM283x platform for the Raspberry Pi 4. Foundation co-founder Eben Upton, though, is clear: the Foundation is currently focusing on supporting the ISA in software, and not with a development board launch.

I'm curious how many Soylentils have a Raspberry Pi (or more than one) and which model(s). How has your experience been? What are the positives and shortcomings you've encountered? Do you think it would be a good move for them to move to RISC-V?

More background on RISC-V is available at Wikipedia.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:38PM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:38PM (#785592)

    Processor choice is important. Arm or risc to me is not the issue. What RPi needs is better Io. Usb to SATA for storage handling is a near failure now. 20MB per second gets you so far. Since that channel is shared by Ethernet and wireless and keyboard and mouse and ... anything else you want to connect. The GPIO is all good for building your own hardware but is limited. MIPI of camera and display gives more IO but does not give a better storage options.

    Looking at the other fruit Pi. That offer more IO choices but not as main stream

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:45PM (8 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:45PM (#785597) Journal

    Looking at the other fruit Pi. That offer more IO choices but not as main stream

    Don't be shy. You can link one of the dozens of other SBCs.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:48PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:48PM (#785627)

      Do you like bananas?

      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:50PM (1 child)

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:50PM (#785703) Journal

        Maybe he likes Banana (Pi) on the MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWN, BEEYIIIIIIIIIIITCH! [/meme]

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by crb3 on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:35PM (1 child)

      by crb3 (5919) on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:35PM (#785681)

      LinuxGizmos [linuxgizmos.com] has been exhaustively covering this topic for years, and publishing a catalog/roundup for several years now. The latest such posting [linuxgizmos.com] has 122 entries, with catalog and tabular display (and the spreadsheet driving the tabular freely offered as well). Just, as mentioned elsewhere, look carefully: not all native-SATA boards have that attribute listed in the catalog-entry bullet points.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by coolgopher on Sunday January 13 2019, @04:43AM (1 child)

      by coolgopher (1157) on Sunday January 13 2019, @04:43AM (#785792)

      Not the AC, but allow me to provide some links anyway:

      • Banana Pi [banana-pi.org] has a bunch of options. Seem reasonably popular. Have tested a Banana Pi M2U, but due to lack of support for SATA port multipliers I didn't stick with it.
      • Orange Pi [orangepi.org] also has a heap of offerings. You'll often find one of these in crypto mining ASIC rigs, since they're so cheap.
      • Beagle Boards [beagleboard.org] are popular in the maker communities. Haven't used any myself.
      • The ODROID [hardkernel.com] family of boards also tend to show in that same context. Again, no personal experience.
      • Nano Pi [nanopi.org] is another contender, but only the low-end of the scale. Haven't tried it.
      • Rock64 [pine64.org] is my favourite SBC at the moment. Comes in a 4G RAM model, and has a USB3.0 port. Blows the RPi 3 out of the water in terms of performance, and well worth the little bit of extra money.

      None of these have the same community as the Raspberry, but in many cases advice for a Raspberry is applicable to any SBC running Linux.

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:48PM

        by Bot (3902) on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:48PM (#786080) Journal

        I use an odroid c1+ as a Kodi/libreelec server after the attempt as a supercollider audio sink was unsuccessful (no mmap mode for the hifi shield). It has an old kernel but if the kernel gets to 4.x i would try again. As a libreelec machine serving 1280x720 video @ 60 fps it is decent and stable. Also tried it with volumio and runeaudio, it worked. Eth is way better than rpi. I'll likely get a c2.

        --
        Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 2) by Teckla on Sunday January 13 2019, @02:07PM

      by Teckla (3812) on Sunday January 13 2019, @02:07PM (#785897)
      For those interested, the ExplainingComputers [youtube.com] guy reviews quite a few different SBCs.
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:30PM (#785640)

    Read enough forums about the Raspberry Pi and the general consensus is that the #1 advantage of RPi is community / critical mass. You have a question or a problem, it's likely already been discussed / solved / made searchable.

    Freakish computing power, no.
    Best design, no.
    Loads RAM or storage options, no.

    You can easily plug it into an HDMI monitor and add a keyboard / mouse, but using it as a general-purpose desktop would never be your first choice. Find a task within its limits, though, and I've found them to be quite nice with answers easily available.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:48PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:48PM (#786001) Journal
      To add to that, this is also a big advantage for software vendors. Supporting the RPi is slightly harder than most ARM boards (the first gen didn't have Thumb-2 support when pretty much everything else did, it has a silly interrupt controller, an insane bootloader and so on), but it gets you a lot more in terms of users. The boards aren't great, but enough people have them that it's worth producing a RPi image.
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:16PM

    by richtopia (3160) on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:16PM (#785658) Homepage Journal

    I agree that better designed SBCs exist. I personally like the ODROID products myself, with an ODROID-C2 next to me right now. I would also buy one of the ODROID's Intel powered H2 if it was on sale; I've migrated back to x86 after adopting Docker.

    However, the Raspberry Pi has always been more than a fun piece of hardware. The Rapsberry Pi Foundation is a charity to promote computer science in schools, and the cheap computer Raspberry Pi was the result of that mission. Being a UK charity, I remember them struggling to find manufacturing in the UK and had to opt for overseas components because of lack of availability. They also have promoted open source and open design with their software and hardware at every opportunity. RISC-V should help remedy some of these comprimises.

  • (Score: 1) by crb3 on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:21PM

    by crb3 (5919) on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:21PM (#785676)

    I'm currently running an Olimex A20-Lime [olimex.com] as a pivot (all office machines ssh in, text passed in notes for swipe-and-paste -- funky but it works here) and downloads server. The SATA is native and, hooked to a laptop drive, burp-free and fast enough to keep up with our modest needs, certainly faster than the K6-2/233 it replaced. Armbian runs it just fine, at 5 watts headless. The only complaint I have is that the GPIO pins are on 0.05" centers, not 0.1", so any hardware hacking will require either special connectors or tweezly wirewrapping. I expect the later Lime2 to be much the same but with better resources.

    Check the latest LinuxGizmos catalog carefully: not all the SATA-equipped boards are listed as such in the bullet-points.