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by rahen 1257 days ago
How well are Linux and the BSDs supported?
2 comments

Linux works somewhat, with some duct taped drivers.

Freebsd boots, but that's it.

Of course, as this board is the first large production run, decent spec'd and reasonably compliant <$100 RISC-V SBC, this is expected to improve quickly as they reach developers and quickstart the ecosystem. That's the true intent of this board.

This is an order of magnitude more boards than accumulated RISC-V development boards distributed to date.

Interesting. I see that NetBSD can now boot on riscv also:

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-riscv/

Good to hear. There are other interesting systems, such as xv6 (which abandoned x86 for RISC-V) or Haiku (which RISC-V support has working desktop from about a year ago, unlike aarch64 which doesn't yet).

My answer was, however, specific to systems that run on VisionFive 2.

The situation should improve dramatically once proper documentation is available.

Not this board, but a $$ RISC-V from Xilinx's PolarFire does:

- Yocto Linux BSP

- Buildroot Linux BSP

- Embedded Linux from Siemens Embedded

- FreeBSD (coming soon)

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/syst...

Polarfire FPGAs are not Xilinx! Which means you can't use things like https://f4pga.readthedocs.io ATM, or tools from Xilinx. Instead being chained to whichever proprietary stuff Microchip decides to deliver for dealing with the FPGA-part.

I've looked at the board, and don't see the appeal in price, for only mediocre CPU-parts, not enough RAM, altough good enough I/O-options. Makes no sense if you don't want to meddle with FPGAs, and just look for a fast SBC with Risc-V.

To me, at least.

I meant MicroChip. Take a chill pill.