[rbanffy]

Perhaps a cheaper route to have an OS up and running on a reference design for hardware that's too new is to implement it on top of MAME.

Even if it takes an 8-way Xeon Platinum to run it at a reasonable speed, I think more people will be able to experiment with it.

And the emulation provides some neat debugging opportunities.

[detaro]

Various RISC-V emulators are available, e.g. you can run Linux on a simulated risc-v processor in qemu.

[rwmj]

Indeed: http://oirase.annexia.org/riscv/

[rbanffy]

True. I wonder how much of this board's hardware is emulated in there.

[rwmj]

Quite a lot, see item 3 below:

    $ qemu-system-riscv64 -machine \?
    Supported machines are:
    none                 empty machine
    sifive_e300          RISC-V Board compatible with SiFive E300 SDK
    sifive_u500          RISC-V Board compatible with SiFive U500 SDK
    spike_v1.10          RISC-V Spike Board (Privileged ISA v1.10)
    spike_v1.9           RISC-V Spike Board (Privileged ISA v1.9.1) (default)
    virt                 RISC-V VirtIO Board (Privileged spec v1.10)