[ale] Really cool new hardware

[Solomon Peachy]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 08:26:18AM -0500, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
> A fully open source cpu design is a game changer.

Is it really?  SPARC, and POWER have all had fully open ISAs and core 
designs since 2005 and 2013, respectively.

As someone who has done low-level hacking on various architectures over 
the years, the actual CPU core/ISA makes very little difference; most of 
the headaches are in the rest of the system[-on-chip].

RISC-V might be fully open from an ISA perspective, but that doesn't 
mean that any given SoC built on it has an open source CPU core, or that 
any of the various controllers (DMA, display, audio, I2S/I2C/SPI, etc) 
or accelerators (video codecs, crypto engines) are open source or even 
have documentation available without three-deep NDAs.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of someone writing software, the 
underlying CPU architecture rarely matters if you're not doing low-level 
OS/compiler hackery or trying to hand-optimize performance-critical code 
that can't be run on a GPU or more specialized accelerator.

> I was quite surprised to see fedora is ready to go on riscV. It's 
> usually Debian or Ubuntu that's first on the ground for new gear.

https://sifivetechsymposium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Fedora_on_RISC-V_SiFive_BJ_2019.pdf

TL;DR: Fedora has a very strong "upstream first" mentality, and Red 
Hatters contribute heavily to all of the upstream projects that needed 
work to enable RISC-V and used Fedora's tooling to work out the kinks.

...meanwhile, has Ubuntu _ever_ preceeded Debian when it comes to 
architecture/platform support?

(I don't mean "here's a pre-built image you can put on an SD card to 
 boot board X and you have to use our special snowflake kernel and 
 bootloader with binary blobs which preclude getting security updates 
 from the distribution")

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
                                      @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
High Springs, FL                      speachy (freenode)
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