SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 TheRaven on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:52PM
If you want to learn bare-metal ARM assembly, get one of the mBed series of devices. They're M-profile, but with a nice set of developer tools. The RPi uses a chip that was originally designed as a graphics coprocessor for set-top boxes, with the ARM core added as an afterthought for controlling some of the less-programmable GPU features. This is apparent in the way that it boots from the GPU first, then the CPU. It's definitely not a good device to try to bring up an OS or some bare-metal code on.
That said, ARM assembly is no different bare metal or in an OS. If you just want to learn, you're probably better off writing userspace code and being able to use your favourite debugger...
sudo mod me up