[tucnak]

Or best buy something like https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor or some other FPGA-based platform to retain the programmable logic capability, you never know whether you're going to need it, and should you need it after all, it helps knowing it's there.

[rwmj]

Love FPGAs, but they're not very practical if you need to run a non-toy Linux on RISC-V. They will typically top out at 100 MHz for the kind of FPGAs that you and I can afford to buy, and have other problems like limited RAM.

[tucnak]

Precursor just happens to use Xilinx Spartan 7-class, a 100 MHz VexRISC-V, RV32IMAC + MMU, 4k L1 I/D cache. But these days you could buy Versal devices with 1M+ LUT, and up to 100K DSP slices, in under a thou. However, integrating it—would be the real challenge. The FPGA hardware is sufficient for many non-toy Linux applications; open hardware isn't. This is a gateware limitation, not a hardware one.