Re:New Xen updates on RISC-V
by contrarian1234 on Saturday May 27, 2023 @07:38AM
(#36093877)
Don't hold your breath. They've had a incredibly disappointing track record with Tinkerboards. Taiwan and Japan .. have a horrible record with open source as far as I can tell? (I can't think of any counterexamples right now)
It's based on a bad chip that violates the privileged spec, by having a hardware pinned TLB entry. On a really bad memory location that breaks standard Linux userspace.
It will never be able to run standard distributions, only bespoke for the device.
Categorically avoid, and hope the next generation Renesas chip is less dumb.
I wonder whether they'll embrace open firmware and mainline Linux (including all drivers) for the entire board.
That's what I really want from RISC V offerings. (Though I understand the current motivation of many with RISC V is simply to avoid ARM licensing fees, and that having trustworthy and long-term sustainable hardware usually isn't a requirement in IoT.)