[HN Gopher] StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC Now Supports TianoCore EDK...
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StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC Now Supports TianoCore EDK II (UEFI)
Author : snvzz
Score : 29 points
Date : 2023-05-15 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forum.rvspace.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (forum.rvspace.org)
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Tangential: Did anyone order from Ameridroid and actually get a
| VisionFive 2 promptly? I ordered back in February. I got the
| shipping insurance but that insurance still just says "order
| received; unable to process a claim yet." Are they just
| backlogged or have I been bamboozled?
| snvzz wrote:
| Mine from waveshare was delivered within two weeks of ordering,
| in late January/early February.
|
| Today there's several shops offering them, including many
| options in aliexpress.
| johnea wrote:
| https://archive.is/Sz6fU
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Probably would be more accurate to say that TianoCore now
| supports the board. UEFI could be ported to more systems, but
| there's little incentive. Also, the main power of UEFI is the
| ability for an OS to get an early framebuffer and nice interface
| to USB/PCI/etc. without knowing the low-level details of the
| system you're booting, and that's a lot of work, especially in
| the embedded ecosystem where SoC vendors just rearrange memory
| layout and blocks between chip revisions (hey, we'll just update
| the Linux driver with the latest mappings, that's fine, right?)
| rektide wrote:
| What if any other RISC-V systems are UEFI capable? Major boon to
| usability.
| thebeardisred wrote:
| We're working on that across all horizontally integrated
| platforms (i.e. datacenter class systems). I'm working on
| making sure that the vertical integration platforms see the
| value (as opposed to a requirement on das uBoot).
| snvzz wrote:
| This is why RISC-V put a lot of effort on the boot process, and
| put it early.
|
| Relevant specifications include but aren't limited to SBI[0],
| UEFI protocol[1] and the ongoing platform specification[2].
|
| RISC-V is quite ready to take over the datacenter, workstation
| and laptop markets, while dodging the issues derived from
| bespoke everything which other architectures challenging x86
| suffer from.
|
| 0. https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-sbi-doc/releases
|
| 1. https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-uefi/releases/
|
| 2. https://github.com/riscv/riscv-platform-specs
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > RISC-V is quite ready to take over the datacenter
|
| The only thing missing: fast power-efficient core designs.
| Eh, how hard could that be? Other than that one little thing,
| _totally_ ready to take over the datacenter.
| snvzz wrote:
| >Eh, how hard could that be?
|
| Really hard.
|
| >Other than that one little thing
|
| Not a little thing at all, but it is being taken care of by
| competent architects, who have succeeded at making very
| competitive high performing micro-architectures in the
| past.
|
| We know about Ventana Veyron, TBA before end of year, and
| Tenstorrent's Ascalon, TBA 2024, led by Wei-han Lien,
| previously lead architect of Apple M1.
|
| Ascalon is 8-wide, but also has smaller siblings at lesser
| decoder width, to cover a range of uses. According to a
| recent presentation by Jim Keller, it is expected to be
| competitive with projected Zen5 (also TBA 2024) performance
| but using considerably less power.
|
| There's also strong teams at Rivos, MIPS and SiFive working
| on very high performance cores, but we know less about
| these efforts.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Sorry, i forgot the "/s"
|
| I know it is hard, which is why i am skeptical. XYZ is
| "working on" fast cores is years to decades away from
| "Server with XYZ cores now available to buy from vendor
| ABC"
| [deleted]
| KirillPanov wrote:
| It's really depressing that no Risc-V hardware currently in
| production has completely open-source firmware.
|
| In this respect Risc-V is much, much more closed than Arm64,
| where we have the totally-blobless RK3399.
|
| Ultimately Risc-V is about vendor-freedom at all costs, even at
| the cost of owner-freedom.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Only reason rk3399 ended up blobless was because ChromiumOS
| team holds that standard. Any ARM SoC used in a Chromebook has
| to have open firmware.
|
| Tap that market, and doors will open!
|
| Un/fortunately nobody don't want a riscv laptop. The (currently
| available) cores just aren't good.
| krasin wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment, but I am more optimistic about the
| future of RISC-V. It considerably lowered the barrier of entry
| for vendors, and so there are more of them! Higher competition
| usually means that users win: they get lower prices, open-
| source toolchains and firmware, etc.
|
| For one, I am very excited about the tiny CH32V003 ([1], [2]),
| a RISC-V 48 MHz microcontroller that costs ~$0.10 and can be
| programmed with completely open-source tools, see [3] and [4].
|
| I am reasonably sure the higher end of the spectrum of RISC-V
| chips will also get better in terms of user-friendliness.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Wrv7nW-S8
|
| 2. http://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V003.html
|
| 3. https://github.com/cnlohr/ch32v003fun
|
| 4. https://github.com/aappleby/PicoRVD
| snvzz wrote:
| Regarding the VisionFive 2 this is about, there's some non-open
| firmware, but it is the GPU's and it is not required to boot.
|
| It is not even required for litting up the screen, as the HDMI
| controller is a separate hardware block, not is it required for
| video decoding acceleration, another separate hardware block.
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(page generated 2023-05-15 23:00 UTC)