$239, same kit as the other models but with the new R-01 Core: Allwinner D1 64-bit single-core RISC-V chip running at 1GHz, no GPU, 1GB of DDR3, powering “a highly experimental model and requires some experience with Linux system & FOSS.”
You’ll need a new operating system image, naturally, but hardware-wise it’s a drop-in replacement: pop out the A-06 Core and put the R-01 Core in its place.
Ofcourse thats what I mean’t by testing Arch-RiscV as they have rootfs for Unmatched and other devices while I can use the their image as they do have D1 support in their kernel, Might need a dts re-write for R-01.
If I can get UART out on R-01 then it would be a good start, while the max we can get out of R-01 is minimal/server images as there is not GPU for hw rendering. Is there customer kernel source which I can look into ?
Maybe @AlexDuan can send one over for development of Arch image ?
For someone not having experience with RISC-V so far,
and only recently finding out that such thing exists,
what would be a good source of information to know more about RISC-V,
what it is,
what to expect from it, this particular core or RISC-V in general
to find out if this is something I would want or not
?
Just placed my order, been excited about DevTerm for awhile and having a platform for hacking on risc-v clinched it.
I know it will be awhile before I have the machine to play with, but in the meantime I’d like to setup an emulation environment so I can start working on getting my dev tools ready. Is there an image that I could download or build that will run on the R-01? I’d like to get the emulation environment as close as possible to the actual hardware so I can work out any kinks before the machine gets here.
One thing, you can pre-order, but don’t forget that China is experiencing a really large Covid spike at the moment and lots of things seems to be impacted by it, so it is most likely that shipping and delivery will be heavily delayed
I was able to find some info and images for the D1 SoC, not sure if they will be directly usable on the R-01 but might be a starting point until something official arrives from ClockworkPi:
I also ordered one. I was already interested in the devterm as well, but the RISC-V release pushed me over the edge. As soon as I receive mine, I am actually thinking of rolling my own Linux system for it. It’ll be really minimal, and I will have to look at pre-existing D1 kernel configurations as well as the kernel configs from pre-existing devterm releases (to get an idea of what’s required for the rest of the devterm hardware beyond the compute module). The D1 being single core makes me think that I’ll want something more minimal than Fedora or Ubuntu… just sayin.
All that said, the D1 is actually pretty feature packed:
CPU Alibaba XuanTie C906 64bit RISC-V core with 32 KB I-cache + 32 KB D-cache
It is, yeah. The thing is, a lot of people won’t read documentation that they have to go search through. a summary of features is then useful. In this case, I think it’s especially useful as this chip was surprisingly more feature rich than I had initially assumed it would be.
I originally asked for the schematics to understand how similar it is to the Lichee RV boards, as that already has a lot of the software stack working, eg Debian already works on them and I want to know how much work it will be to get Debian running on the R-01. I’m sort of assuming that it’s similar, which allows me to start playing with the software stack in qemu while I wait for my R-01 to be shipped in a few months time.
Is there already an official distribution available for the RISC-V module or kernel patches and the like? I saw a running system on twitter but I cannot find patches or instructions to build images for this module.
Any pointers to such locations would be great or some ideas to build a distribution for this. Thanks.