<html><head></head><body>All true. Spark and Power are (mostly,?)dead and no longer produced outside of industrial gear.<br><br>I guess my real enthusiasm is for the "designed for Linux" aspect. <br><br>I don't play games so I'm not sure what runs all the consoles now. I also don't have any beagle toys yet. My electronic skills are really rusty and never were design oriented. I designed and built only one power supply and it was strange, variable current 0-5A at one pin pair, variable voltage 0-1000V on another pin pair, one pin common between the two. Basically a variac driven tube. The 0.5 F capacitor was fun.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On January 17, 2021 11:12:55 AM EST, Solomon Peachy <pizza@shaftnet.org> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 08:26:18AM -0500, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">A fully open source cpu design is a game changer.<br></blockquote><br>Is it really? SPARC, and POWER have all had fully open ISAs and core <br>designs since 2005 and 2013, respectively.<br><br>As someone who has done low-level hacking on various architectures over <br>the years, the actual CPU core/ISA makes very little difference; most of <br>the headaches are in the rest of the system[-on-chip].<br><br>RISC-V might be fully open from an ISA perspective, but that doesn't <br>mean that any given SoC built on it has an open source CPU core, or that <br>any of the various controllers (DMA, display, audio, I2S/I2C/SPI, etc) <br>or accelerators (video codecs, crypto engines) are open source or even <br>have documentation available without three-deep NDAs.<br><br>Meanwhile, from the perspective of someone writing software, the <br>underlying CPU architecture rarely matters if you're not doing low-level <br>OS/compiler hackery or trying to hand-optimize performance-critical code <br>that can't be run on a GPU or more specialized accelerator.<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">I was quite surprised to see fedora is ready to go on riscV. It's <br>usually Debian or Ubuntu that's first on the ground for new gear.<br></blockquote><br><a href="https://sifivetechsymposium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Fedora_on_RISC-V_SiFive_BJ_2019.pdf">https://sifivetechsymposium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Fedora_on_RISC-V_SiFive_BJ_2019.pdf</a><br><br>TL;DR: Fedora has a very strong "upstream first" mentality, and Red <br>Hatters contribute heavily to all of the upstream projects that needed <br>work to enable RISC-V and used Fedora's tooling to work out the kinks.<br><br>...meanwhile, has Ubuntu _ever_ preceeded Debian when it comes to <br>architecture/platform support?<br><br>(I don't mean "here's a pre-built image you can put on an SD card to <br> boot board X and you have to use our special snowflake kernel and <br> bootloader with binary blobs which preclude getting security updates <br> from the distribution")<br><br> - Solomon</pre></blockquote></div><br>-- <br>Computers amplify human error<br>Super computers are really cool</body></html>