(also posted on @selfhost)
RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is an alternative to ARM. I had thought that we were still waiting for a stable Linux distribution on RISC-V devices, but it turns out many RISC-V machines can run Debian already.
Does anyone have a RISC-V device that they use regularly? How has it been working?
i dont even know how to get a risc v processor
Get a BeagleBoard! https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead
Edit: or a Star64! https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/
Pine64 sells single board computers with Risc-V
Most of them are embedded into stuff like storage controllers for SSDs (Western Digital is using RISC-V for all future storage controllers) or server chips, but you can get development boards on Alibaba which are at best similar or just ahead of the Raspberry pi4 atm
They’re mostly in SBCs and dev systems right now. I know StarFive makes RISC V SBCs, and I think Pine64 has a RISC V tablet and SBC available. It’s all pretty low end and intended for dev work from what I can tell though
There are now some ESP32 modules that are RISC-V rather than Xtensa.
BeagleBone has two RISCV SBC recently. One uses a chip from Microchip which is partially an FPGA also, and the other one uses a chip from a Chinese company
Definitely interested - is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?
I’ve been bitten before with a device that “supports” a major distribution, but only if you install our custom pre-built image (good luck auditing what we’ve tweaked) and only with our special pre-built kernel that isn’t even an LTS version, and has a bunch of patches applied to support whatever weird peripherals we decided to throw on the board, and will get exactly 0 updates after the initial release.
Raspberry Pi gets around this by being big enough to get buy in from vendors (Ubuntu distributes a special kernel + firmware bundle), but support for all the other smaller knock offs seem shaky at best
is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?
Unfortunately, sounds like “no” currently. The ones that let you install Debian usually provide some kind of custom Debian image for that specific SBC. Like you, I’m not really a fan of that. But apparently there are some desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs coming out. Hopefully that will increase the chance of things getting supported in mainline distros.
Yes, I have a VisionFive 2 and I use it to host some websites. I have am Arch Linux image compiled by a user in a forum, but the userspace packages are from a RISC-V repository from a other people working in Arch in general.
I could run my websites but it wasn’t easy at first, because, yes I have Docker but there are almost no images for riscv64, so I had to do some compiling and build images in a local registry. Bu now it works pretty well.
It sounds like the answer to “can I run this application on RISC-V” is very dependent on what the backend for that application is. What’s the backend stack for your websites? Are they static HTML sites, or do they have other components? Someone else mentioned that they built postgres and mariadb Docker images for RISC-V, but I don’t even know which programming languages can be compiled for RISC-V right now.
Yes. My apps are not static: one is a Django app (Python) using Postgres. I had to compile both Postgres and Python but that’s because I wanted to use them in Docker but there were no images available (maybe there are now, things change fast in this world).
Other was a Rust app, also using Postgres. For this I had to wait until a cryptography library (ring) added support to RISC-V since they use some assembly to improve the performance. After that, it was fine.
I’ve been experimenting with more stuff, in general almost all important languages work, but beware that even if it works, they might not be as performant as in ARM or x86. Java for example, worked but the JVM didn’t have a JIT so it was very slow (this is fixed now, but some distros still ship it without JIT AFAIK).
I have a Milk-V Mars but it really isn’t performant enough for any task I have for an SBC. Distro support seems to be a pain too, as the provided Debian image isn’t meant to run on repos aside from a Debian snapshot from 2022.
I really do hope things improve. I’m planning on moving over to an RK3588 ARM board for desktop daily drivering but one day I’m hoping a decently affordable RISC V alternative will turn up.
I want to, but I don’t have any :(
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !selfhost@lemmy.ml
Nothing practical unfortunately since I already have a headless raspberry pi and x86 machine that are no where near capacity. But I do love compiling whatever rust/golang project I’m working on to riscV just to see it run there.
I also have an arm32 box so I have fun running binaries on 4 different instruction sets. Admittedly the novelty has worn off as everything just works.
The work to get the larger linux ecosystem working on riscV is unfortunately outside my domain and skill level.
From a free software perspective there are Arm board that work with no proprietary software.
I thought about it but there is not much in the way of support
