| I've played with a bunch of RISC-V platforms, mostly SBCs in the raspi class Beyond the potential platform fragmentation due to the variability of the ISA (a very unfortunate design choice IMO), mentioned elsewhere in this thread, what I find most frustrating is the boot process / equivalent of BIOS in that world. My impression: complete lack of standardization, a ton of ad-hoc tools native to each vendor, a complete mess, especially when it comes to get the board to boot from devices the vendor didn't target (eg SSDs). Until two things happen: 1. a CPU with a somewhat competitive compute power appears (so far, all the SBC's I've tried are way behind ARM and x86) 2. a unified BOOT environment which supports a broad standard of devices to boot from (SSD, network, SD-Card, hard-drives, etc...) the whole RISC-V thing will remain a tiny niche thing, especially because when a vendor loses interest in the platform, all of the SW that is native to the platform goes to rot immediately (not that it was particularly good quality in the first place). |
I think this is going to embarrassingly wrong.
> all of the SW that is native to the platform
There are several RISC-V Linux distros where essentially all the software available for the x86-64 platform is also available on the RISC-V edition. Let’s use Ubuntu as an example.
> when a vendor loses interest in the platform > the platform goes to rot immediately
Ubuntu will provide updates for 15 years. That does not seem very immediate.
For RVA23 hardware, I expect even new Ubuntu releases to support it up to around 2030 at least. 15 years from then will be 2045. I cannot say that I am picking up what you are laying down here.