So, things got really interesting now. I was waiting for an update from pine64 but this one came earlier. Also Clockworkpi engineers are you guys cooking anything in lab, before I buy this?
What are the chances of everything working right out of the box? as being advertised as RaspberryPI module compatible, any thoughts?
Specifications:
SoC – StarFive JH7110
CPU – Quad-core RISC-V processor at up to 1.5GHz
GPU – Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU with support for OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.2
I think RISC-V is cool because its open source* (in a BSD license sort of way*). But, ARM already has a huge problem with the lack of software ported over from x86. Imagine RISC-V. Would be a nightmare to actually get all the software i want. My point is, its for developers, and not for average users. That being said, i hope developers can get their hands on this stuff and work on it to their hearts content!
As a developer, ARM or Risc-V for 99% of the use case make no difference to you.
Distro like Ubuntu are near partty on their RV build compared to Intel and ARM. The only thing the RV/Distro community is waiting is for decent SoC with good CPU and peripheral and enough device on the market for the things to properly bootstrap.
And both the BeagleV, StarFiveVision Five 2, and other devices based on the TH1520 and JH7110 are slowly providing that.
I’ve got a Mars CM in hand here and been looking at it and it has potential - I’m mostly playing with getting some builds running on it while waiting for my uConsole to be delivered. At some point I’ll have a proper look at the schematics and check that side of things (if no one else has) What I suspect initially might be an issue is that the Mars CM seems to run quite toasty and there’s certainly no physical space for the chonky heat sink that Milk-V sell with it.
One thing I spotted of interest is that the DevTerm wiki has this vague and curious page referencing a 7110 dev board that I’d be interested to know if the clockwork pi team would say any more about this
Have you looked at them? They appear to be a mosh mash of excerpts from the vision five 2 and rock 3 cm schematics… I wonder if the net names match up?
I have both the milk-v cm and uconsole.
I am trying to figure out the best way to go about it and learning how to patch the Linux kernel. For now I have been just reading and trying to figure things out because milk-v documentation and uconsole documentation is lacking.
Office 365 is not available for Linux
Zoom, Discord, Spotify are mostly electron apps, if there is no accelerated chrome for RISC-V that’s the reasons, plus as all of these “apps” are not open source, it is up to the people releasing them to provide a RISC-V version.
Same for Steam, which to be honest for the time being, I’m not sure why you would want Steam on a device with low-end to no GPU.
All of these examples are not “this can’t work on Risc-V” but more “these are closed sources app, that the people making them have no interest in releasing the app on RISC-V”
There are some apps that cannot run or build on RV for now because they are dependant on assembly code for good performances, like apps using a form of JIT, but they are really not the norm here.
Ah gotcha - yeah, that’s more commercial software that developers won’t ever port to niche systems as thats just not commercially viable for them. (OK, not strictly true with Microsoft and their massive money pot, its more that it wouldn’t benefit them / their windows ecosystem)
You have to remember / accept, if you want to run commercial software you’ll always need to comply with what the vendor offers you as a supported system. Alternative OS’s let alone non x86 architectures are unlikely to ever be an option except in lucky rare cases.
Considering people have a hard time getting these devices to boot on simple CM4 adapters I doubt getting this working would be easy.
I don’t doubt that if the right person was interested and worked on it it is possible but I think it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
