[swetland]

Still no sign of an actual Technical Reference Manual or any other detailed documentation on the SoC (registers, peripherals, etc). A big pile of Linux patches, while better than nothing, is a poor substitute for actual documentation.

SiFive does provide docs for the core complex (processors, cache, irq controller, etc), but that doesn't cover any SoC-specific peripherals.

[progbits]

Agreed. But I feel like that is still a step ahead of RPi where you get random firmware blobs for the GPU without which it won't even boot.

[swetland]

It's definitely nicer to have source than a bunch of opaque binaries. (Is there source for the full boot path? Sounds like they have patches for OpenSBI and u-boot -- didn't see if there was source or docs for the on-die boot rom.)

I just find the "all you need is Linux patches" approach annoying. There are BSD variants and little experimental and homebrew OSes out there that would be fun to run on a capable RISC-V SBC and even if you are using Linux it's still nice to have some documentation to refer to beyond whatever the silicon vendor implemented in various driver patches.