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I wanted to check first, and I wasn't saddened when I found netbsd was also available for riscv64. That being said, having a full debian suite to nicely land o
by superdug 3y ago
I wanted to check first, and I wasn't saddened when I found netbsd was also available for riscv64. That being said, having a full debian suite to nicely land on is what will gain it adoption. It's a chicken and egg problem where one side is vigorously designing and publishing a hardware spec in search of an operating system and at the same time an entire eco-system of open source development is in search of open hardware to run on.
Fully open systems are an entirely ideological win at this point with a now sub-$50 entry point setups available today. Please also do not get me wrong, working around copy protection and binary blobs serve as amazing learning tools for tinkerers, but not for true beginners.
Some people learn from hands on breaking it and putting it back together, but others learn by knowing that there is a fully documented dearth of information within a mere quandary of any part of the system.
These two worlds are not antagonistic, but in fact entirely complementary to each other. To fully understand and master a system, you have to break it and know how to fix it. While on the same hand knowing how to see what part broke and see an exact way to fix it in the completely free entirety of information available until time itself forgets it, gives you the confidence that there isn't anything you don't know or knowing instantly where to find it if you don't.
That free and open standard will lend itself to future chip designs, broader software options for those designs, and start to make computers adopt there new role as segregated fully autonomous systems loosely networked together into the same status that all 99th percentile that all previous technology has adopted throughout history.
The nerds won, we made computers into a skilled labor.
You're welcome.
- ur-whale 3y agoNo snarkiness intended, but I just read your post for the 3rd time and although I understand each sentence individually, I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make.
- superdug 3y agoIt's an amazing accomplishment that we'll see the benefits of for centuries. The culmination of a free operating system on free hardware that is.
- ur-whale 3y agoThanks for the summary, the original text makes more sense with that as context.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y agoSurely that was generated by an LLM? Artificial indeed.
- superdug 3y agoNo, but I’ll take any moniker of intelligence at this point in my life, so thank you! If you’d like I can prove my Turing completeness if you’d like.
- xyproto 3y agoUsually when people feel like this, it is because the text has been generated by a LLM.
- alexeldeib 3y agoWhat makes you think it’s an LLM? It made fine sense to me, it’s just an odd style
- superdug 3y agoSimply someone getting a break to philosophize about a crowning achievement in my eyes as the entire idea of free and open had yet to even be fully defined let alone on the precipice of realization four decades ago when I signed on to this free information roller coaster that changed the world.
- lproven 3y ago> It made fine sense to me, "Fine sense"? Even that isn't a standard phrase. I doubt you, TBH. Each paragraph barely coheres. Examples: > an entirely ideological win What does that mean? > there is a fully documented dearth of information ... is nonsensical. > a mere quandary of any part of the system More nonsense. > in the completely free entirety of information available until time itself forgets it ... wut? > adopt there new role Benefit of the doubt: typo Doesn't make sense even fixed, though. > segregated fully autonomous systems loosely networked together ... wut? > the same status that all 99th percentile that all previous technology What? > The nerds won, we made computers into a skilled labor. Always was. This is word salad. If you scan very hastily and you're not good at skimming -- and writing online for 10s to 100s of thousands of readers a day has taught me that many people can't skim to save their lives but they don't know that they can't -- it may look superficially like coherent English text, but it isn't.
- alexeldeib 3y agotbh, on re-read I agree it's awkward, but to take some of the bait: >> an entirely ideological win > What does that mean? ideological win makes sense. what's an entirely ideological win? one without non-ideological impact. >> there is a fully documented dearth of information > ... is nonsensical. disagree. it is entirely sensical for a dearth of information about a well-defined topic to be documented. see: every github issue for project documentation ever.
- ilyt 3y agoOnly benefit is companies not having to pay ARM. The architecture NEVER WAS A PROBLEM for open, it was always the binary blobs required to run IP blocks put on the die with the cores that stopped people from using them. ISA is the easy part. Even if you need to RE it, you only need to do it once. Now hopefully with RISC V companies will be even more inclined to just upstream their drivers from the start (and not do the abominations that happen way too often on ARM side), but the ISA never was a problem for that.
- giantrobot 3y ago> it was always the binary blobs required to run IP blocks put on the die with the cores that stopped people from using them That's not going to change with RISC-V. If you've got silicon that has to conform with FCC regulations it's going to have non-modifiable firmware. No matter how open the rest of the system is, your WiFi and Bluetooth (and any other radios) will have closed firmware.
- leonheld 3y agoI'm not from the US so not really familiar with FCC regulations. > If you've got silicon that has to conform with FCC regulations it's going to have non-modifiable firmware. Can you explain 'why?' or maybe throw me a link or two? Thanks!
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago"Fully open systems are an entirely ideological win at this point with a now sub-$50 entry point setups available today." It's not entirely ideological. The advantage an open, license-free, RISC-V brings to the table is ISA flexibility and freedom, the ability for people to bring innovation in terms of extensions, create their own flavours. And where we'll hopefully see this innovation is in realms like AI and graphics and vector. e.g. bringing compute back in from the GPU, by chip producers bundling extensions into their custom RISC-V implementations and then providing the requisite add-ons for llvm, SDKs, etc. We've already seen the excellent things Apple was able to do with ARM because they had the chip under their own control and were no longer beholden to ARM^H^H^HIntel (or Motorola/IBM before that). I am hopeful we'll see similar excellence around RISC-V. (EDIT: I had typo'd "ARM" here but meant to write Intel) Though this will all come at the cost of some amount of fragmentation, at least the base instruction set is standardized, and a standard method for extension put in place.
- klelatti 3y ago> We've already seen the excellent things Apple was able to do with ARM because they had the chip under their own control and were no longer beholden to ARM (or Motorola/IBM before that). Sorry? Apple remains an Arm licensee and everything they have done will be consistent with the terms of their license.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoOh, just noticed I'd written "with ARM" when I meant to write Intel when talking about Apple being beholden. Fixed. My understanding is Apple has an architectural license, broader than what some other licensees have, and it permits them to make architectural changes that people without that license cannot. And while I don't know the current business terms of this, I would speculate that by them being part of the original joint venture that created ARM in the first place they have at least some remaining better pricing on that than others would? In any case, correct me if I'm wrong on that... but there's also the fact that by controlling the whole software stack Apple is also able to initiate changes that would be difficult for any other hardware vendor.