Open hardware

[Simon Clubley]

As for RISC-V, who is offering RISC-V 64-bit servers or cloud instances
as of now? I count Scaleway, since early March, but they're bare metal
servers, *not* Linux ready to run. RISC-V has a lot of hype, somewhat
questionable potential, and not very much in service that's suitable for
VMS.

RISC-V only supplies part of the solution. There's only limited utility
to the CPU architecture being open when the rest of the hardware, GPU,
onboard memory setup, etc, is still behind heavily restricted datasheets
and manuals.

What I would really like to see is a _completely_ open board, including
GPU and peripheral/memory documentation, with the documentation written
in enough detail that you could in theory write your own OS from scratch
without ever having to sign a single NDA or beg for access to some
restricted documentation.

Simon.

[Chris Townley]

Post by Simon Clubley

As for RISC-V, who is offering RISC-V 64-bit servers or cloud instances
as of now? I count Scaleway, since early March, but they're bare metal
servers, *not* Linux ready to run. RISC-V has a lot of hype, somewhat
questionable potential, and not very much in service that's suitable for
VMS.

RISC-V only supplies part of the solution. There's only limited utility
to the CPU architecture being open when the rest of the hardware, GPU,
onboard memory setup, etc, is still behind heavily restricted datasheets
and manuals.
What I would really like to see is a _completely_ open board, including
GPU and peripheral/memory documentation, with the documentation written
in enough detail that you could in theory write your own OS from scratch
without ever having to sign a single NDA or beg for access to some
restricted documentation.
Simon.

Take a look at

However Jeff Geerling quotes the company as saying don't buy it!

[Dan Cross]

Post by Simon Clubley

As for RISC-V, who is offering RISC-V 64-bit servers or cloud instances
as of now? I count Scaleway, since early March, but they're bare metal
servers, *not* Linux ready to run. RISC-V has a lot of hype, somewhat
questionable potential, and not very much in service that's suitable for
VMS.

RISC-V only supplies part of the solution. There's only limited utility
to the CPU architecture being open when the rest of the hardware, GPU,
onboard memory setup, etc, is still behind heavily restricted datasheets
and manuals.
What I would really like to see is a _completely_ open board, including
GPU and peripheral/memory documentation, with the documentation written
in enough detail that you could in theory write your own OS from scratch
without ever having to sign a single NDA or beg for access to some
restricted documentation.

Yup, this. It's an incredibly hard problem.

Not only for OEMs, but for the component vendors themselves.
Consider that many are buying IP from third party component
vendors that themselves have firmware blobs that they distribute.
Setting up things like IO buses is thorny when you need to do
real signal processing to make it happen.

- Dan C.