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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: 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.