Debian adds RISC-V as an official architecture

[Posted July 24, 2023 by corbet]

The Debian project is now supporting 64-bit RISC-V systems as an official architecture. Some work remains to be done, though:

However before you rush to update your sources.list file, I want to warn you that the archive is currently almost empty, and that only the sid and experimental suites are available. The procedure is to rebootstrap the port within the official archive, which means we won't import the full debian-ports archive.

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 24, 2023 19:13 UTC (Mon) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link] (11 responses)

I've never gotten around to using RISC-V so far, but I think it could be fun to play around with it a bit, especially since distro support seems to be improving steadily (not just Debian). Do people here have recommendations for boards that are ideal for dipping my toes into Linux/RISC-V? (Could also be a board that isn't out yet but will come out later this year.)

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 24, 2023 20:16 UTC (Mon) by gspr (guest, #91542) [Link] (8 responses)

I'd also love to hear such recommendations. Sadly, my own limited research seems to indicate that there are only three types of boards out there: (1) high quality ones that are too expensive for casual learning (i.e. >€1000), (2) miraculously cheap boards with absolutely no upstream Linux support, requiring a specific, unmaintained and un-upstreamable vendor fork of an ancient kernel, documented only in Chinese, or (3) MCU type stuff with no MMU and no capability for running a full-blown OS.

Type (1) boards are seemingly also often out of stock. The type (2) situation is a lot like the cheapo Arm SBC world, so you can indeed do a lot there, but it sure leaves something to be desired. Type (3) apparently includes some pretty great stuff, but it's a different world than what we need for playing with Linux on RISC-V.

I'd love to be proven wrong :-)

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 24, 2023 20:41 UTC (Mon) by jrtc27 (subscriber, #107748) [Link] (1 responses)

The VisionFive 2 has had its teething issues (including in the firmware department) but it's getting there and will likely be one of the best-supported boards for a reasonable price in the near future.

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 25, 2023 6:40 UTC (Tue) by marcin (subscriber, #159076) [Link]

There is Star64 from Pine64 that is, for the most part, compatible with VisionFive 2 (it even MOSTLY runs VisionFive 2 images, at least it boots them to the UART console). The biggest problem of VisionFive 2 and Star64 is that they chose to use an Imagination Technologies GPU - we are promised open source drivers, the proprietary ones leave a lot to be desired (I have a limited knowledge on that matter, but it involves building an outdated mesa fork with LLVM 14, needs an open source out-of-tree kernel driver, proprietary libraries).

On another note, Pine64 accepts preorders for PineTab-V, a tablet built on top of Star64.

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 24, 2023 20:44 UTC (Mon) by ewen (subscriber, #4772) [Link] (3 responses)

FWIW the Beagle V Ahead that I commented on in parallel to your comment is US$149 (plus shipping and taxes), and in stock at DigiKey (and maybe some others; but not all the distributors): https://beagleboard.org/beaglev-ahead

It’s a Chinese designed CPU (T-Head) but the single board computer design is from BeagleBoard which may help address your concerns. I’m not sure how upstream the support is, but I expect BeagleBoard are trying to do so if it isn’t already, as their other (ARM based) boards were pretty well supported.

And yes there’s also a bunch of microcontroller RISCV32 CPUs/dev boards around very cheaply (which are fun, but as you note won’t run Linux).

Ewen

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 24, 2023 21:35 UTC (Mon) by gspr (guest, #91542) [Link] (2 responses)

This is fantastic news! Thanks for informing me. Does it run anything close to an upstream/mainline kernel though?

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 24, 2023 22:02 UTC (Mon) by ewen (subscriber, #4772) [Link]

Sorry, I'm not sure how close to the upstream Linux kernel it is at present. I saw the announcement that it was available, saw it was in stock, impulsively ordered one (in case it suddenly went out of stock again!), and while I've received it, I've yet to actually power it on. The announcement has a bit more background detail, including that the Beagle V Ahead ships with Yocto Linux.

Searching now, the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 processor does seem to be used on some other Linux-compatible RISCV boards (including a SiSpeed one it seems), and have had some DTBs submitted to upstream (eg, May 2023); I've not confirmed if they've been merged, but it seems hopefully they are/will be.

Ewen

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 25, 2023 8:03 UTC (Tue) by Fishwaldo (subscriber, #47595) [Link]

The JH7110 SOC (in VisionFive2, Star64, PineTabV etc) has probably the best mainline support (excluding GPU as noted already), which is being spearheaded by StarFive (SOC manufacturer). TH1520 has very basic mainline support, and so far is been done by the community reverse engineering a 5.10 vendor kernel. I’ve not seen much activity from T-Head on mainline efforts. (And TH1520 also used an Imagination GPU, so same situation as JH7110). The bigger challenge in mainline is not actually the RISC-V Core. It’s the proprietary peripherals like USB, Ethernet, Clocks etc which have little, to no public technical documentation.

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 24, 2023 23:05 UTC (Mon) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)

> The type (2) situation is a lot like the cheapo Arm SBC world,

I mean, the whole situation looks suspiciously similar to the Arm SBC world :-)

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 25, 2023 10:04 UTC (Tue) by pm215 (subscriber, #98099) [Link]

I think that's unsurprising, because the conditions that result in "cheap boards are often not supported in mainline, and boards that are good are super expensive" are the same underlying economics -- chips are much cheaper in bulk but "dev board for hackers" is definitely not a high-volume market, and so a cheap development board is cheap because it is borrowing chips that were designed to be used in some other (likely embedded) usecase, where "runs upstream kernels" and "is well documented and supported" and "high performance" are not requirements and so don't happen. Picking a different ISA doesn't change that.

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 24, 2023 20:35 UTC (Mon) by ewen (subscriber, #4772) [Link] (1 responses)

One recently released Linux capable RISCV64 single board computer is the Beagle V Ahead (designed by BeagleBoard): https://beagleboard.org/beaglev-ahead

They were announced earlier this month, still seem to be in stock (eg at DigiKey), and are relatively inexpensive. There are Debian, Ubuntu, etc installers available for them from a quick check of available software images.

Ewen

Any board recommendations?

Posted Jul 25, 2023 6:57 UTC (Tue) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link]

> One recently released Linux capable RISCV64 single board computer is the Beagle V Ahead (designed by BeagleBoard): https://beagleboard.org/beaglev-ahead

Thanks for the suggestion!