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Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership

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

martyb writes:

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, @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.

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  • (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.
    --
    sudo mod me up