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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.
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:54PM (7 children)
Just never could really get into them.
Probably because I have a surfeit of old junkers that are far more capable I could hook to any given display device.
Left one just sitting there powered up for six months and it toasted the SD card (probably the cheap SD card's fault but who knows, new card and it worked fine again.)
I occasionally look for a reason to play with them without much success.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:08PM (2 children)
It's possible that a 4th or 5th edition of RasPi would be more powerful than my current computers. If they released a RISC-V version, I would probably turn it into a dedicated Tor box (not TAILS, that doesn't even run on ARM).
As for your existing pies, somebody has probably compiled a list of "10,000 things you can do with your RasPi". Even if 99% of them are shit or need extra hardware/sensors, I bet you could figure something out.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by NateMich on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:28PM (1 child)
But if the io and ram are crippled again, that's very unlikely.
The problem I've always had with these things (and I no longer own one) is that once you have all the parts needed to make this into a cheap and functional little machine, you've saved almost nothing from just using a very low end PC (like a mini itx with soldered on processor). The PC will be nearly infinitely more powerful and flexible.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday January 12 2019, @11:14PM
Do you know the intent of the Pi? It was to make the cheapest system so students could afford it for learning. If you need something more powerful then buy it. This is engineering 101.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:26PM
I had MycroftAI on mine, then tried to establish it as a media player (successful but slow, with Plex at least).
Just need time again to put Mycroft back on. Downloaded the image but .... sigh.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:58PM
I'm listening to some 1970's Prog right now from a Raspberry Pi running Volumio, with a 7" touchscreen and DAC plugged into a nice pair of powered speakers.
It has been a really nice way to have access to my media server and a bunch of online radio stations.
The fact that there's such a great community means that if I break it someone else has probably done much worse and has a solution for me.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:19AM
I only had one Pi fail and I've got a shitload of Pi's, 13 at last count. The only failure was an 8GB SD card that came with one of those crappy Amazon kits that provide a Raspberry Pi, power supply, SD card and case. Total shit card. Every other SD card I got with a kit was slow as hell too but I've not had any failures. Lesson learned. I always buy high quality cards now, usually EVO+ or better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by toddestan on Monday January 14 2019, @03:15AM
I have one, and like you it was cool to play around with but couldn't find a use for it. Hooked it up to a keyboard mouse and monitor, but contrary to what some people say it's just too slow to run a modern desktop and web browser. Hooked up some LEDs and blinked some lights and stuff, but after the novelty wore off it got shelved for a bit.
Eventually, I did manage to turn it into a music player. Nothing fancy, just installed Slackware ARM (for some reason the Debian derivative would lock up after a couple of weeks) and hooked up an old monitor and keyboard and mouse, mapped some network drives, and use XMMS to play music.
There's some at work they bought for us to play around with. Maybe if they actually gave us time to do something with them we might find something to use them for. We tried turning some into web terminals, but once again just too slow.