[ale] Really cool new hardware

[Michael Potter]

I skimmed the article.

I did not see anywhere where it said what made it made for Linux.

Any clue?

I would expect two things....

Some kind of instructions specific for networking.

Instructions specific for fork().




On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 11:50 AM Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> All true. Spark and Power are (mostly,?)dead and no longer produced
> outside of industrial gear.
>
> I guess my real enthusiasm is for the "designed for Linux" aspect.
>
> I don't play games so I'm not sure what runs all the consoles now. I also
> don't have any beagle toys yet. My electronic skills are really rusty and
> never were design oriented. I designed and built only one power supply and
> it was strange, variable current 0-5A at one pin pair, variable voltage
> 0-1000V on another pin pair, one pin common between the two. Basically a
> variac driven tube. The 0.5 F capacitor was fun.
>
> On January 17, 2021 11:12:55 AM EST, Solomon Peachy <pizza at shaftnet.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 08:26:18AM -0500, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
>>
>>> A fully open source cpu design is a game changer.
>>>
>>
>> Is it really?  SPARC, and POWER have all had fully open ISAs and core
>> designs since 2005 and 2013, respectively.
>>
>> As someone who has done low-level hacking on various architectures over
>> the years, the actual CPU core/ISA makes very little difference; most of
>> the headaches are in the rest of the system[-on-chip].
>>
>> RISC-V might be fully open from an ISA perspective, but that doesn't
>> mean that any given SoC built on it has an open source CPU core, or that
>> any of the various controllers (DMA, display, audio, I2S/I2C/SPI, etc)
>> or accelerators (video codecs, crypto engines) are open source or even
>> have documentation available without three-deep NDAs.
>>
>> Meanwhile, from the perspective of someone writing software, the
>> underlying CPU architecture rarely matters if you're not doing low-level
>> OS/compiler hackery or trying to hand-optimize performance-critical code
>> that can't be run on a GPU or more specialized accelerator.
>>
>> I was quite surprised to see fedora is ready to go on riscV. It's
>>> usually Debian or Ubuntu that's first on the ground for new gear.
>>>
>>
>> https://sifivetechsymposium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Fedora_on_RISC-V_SiFive_BJ_2019.pdf
>>
>> TL;DR: Fedora has a very strong "upstream first" mentality, and Red
>> Hatters contribute heavily to all of the upstream projects that needed
>> work to enable RISC-V and used Fedora's tooling to work out the kinks.
>>
>> ...meanwhile, has Ubuntu _ever_ preceeded Debian when it comes to
>> architecture/platform support?
>>
>> (I don't mean "here's a pre-built image you can put on an SD card to
>>  boot board X and you have to use our special snowflake kernel and
>>  bootloader with binary blobs which preclude getting security updates
>>  from the distribution")
>>
>>  - Solomon
>>
>>
> --
> Computers amplify human error
> Super computers are really cool
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-- 
Michael Potter
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