PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

Re:PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to... by inetsee on Friday September 04, 2020 @07:04PM (#24379786)

I believe it's because the Broadcom System-on-a-Chip (SOC) that the Raspberry Pi uses has one or more binary BLOBS that are required to access features on the SOC. RISC-V is an open standard; chips made based on this standard are open source.

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Re:PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to... by mrob on Friday September 04, 2020 @07:21PM (#24379918)

The RISC-V standard allows proprietary implementations, and several proprietary implementations exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Implementations

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Re:PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to... by kayfox on Friday September 04, 2020 @07:41PM (#24380051)

It is possible for open source replacements for those blobs to be written, but I have not heard of any serious effort in that respect.

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Re:PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to... by floatboth on Saturday September 05, 2020 @06:46AM (#24382690)

https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware is a pretty serious attempt at the bootloader (incl. VC4 side). As in they can boot an OS, with some limitations but still.

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Re:PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to... by duck2 on Friday September 04, 2020 @09:36PM (#24380708)

It's just an open instruction set architecture. You can implement an open or closed source CPU on top of it.

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