[phkahler]

Fair point. However, there will never be AGP or IDE for it. In fact there is no hardware with PCI and RISC V and may never be. My point is that they could solve the "what hardware do we support" problem by porting to architecture that doesn't have any hardware yet ;-) it would be gamble on an arch...

[bastawhiz]

Do modern motherboards even still ship with AGP and IDE? I thought those were on a death march almost a decade ago.

[detaro]

You can still get mainboards for modern CPUs (e.g. Intel Skylake) with PCI slots. Not sure how they work internally, e.g. if there is a PCIe bridge and if yes on what level PCI emulation happens.

[dom0]

PCI is a CPU-independent bus (unlike AT/ISA), it isn't really emulated, rather, there's a host bridge on these mainboards that connect it to PCIe from the CPU or southbridge.

[phkahler]

No they don't make them any more. But my AMD64 machine from 2005 has AGP, IDE, and SATA. It's well supported by Fedora 25 which is a month old. Unless you're in new territory you have to decide what to support and will never gain traction due to the limited support.

[ajdlinux]

Once RISC-V matures, I'd be very surprised if no-one makes a board with PCIe slots, a SATA controller, a USB controller and all the other things which are relatively similar to a PC.

[TD-Linux]

In fact, one is already in progress (the U500): https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/