[Linux-aus] RISC-V

[jon.maddog.hall@gmail.com]

I thought I would pitch in here.

I have been working for some time with the University of Sao Paulo in developing a "Raspberry Pi" alternative.  This was mostly due to the cost of shipping and import duty on the 35 USD RPi that makes it cost the equivalent of 150 USD by the time it gets to the "street".

One day I pointed out to the head of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department that you could create a "really open GPU" using an FPGA.   I did not mean for that to replace NVIDIA or ATI on a desktop gaming system, but it could do low-level graphics like color blending and anti-aliasing for embedded systems.

The professor looked at me strangely and said "you are right".

Three months later two of his graduate students had generated a virtual "Open GPU" based on an emulated FPGA that passed all of the OpenGL test suits.   Of course it was not blazingly fast, both because it was sample code but because the FPGA was emulated, but it was pretty impressive.

The next step would be to put the code into a real FPGA, but unfortunately the students graduated and disappeared, the the professor has not been able to convince any other students to take the project further to finality.

Warmest regards,

maddog


> On 03/24/2023 9:45 PM Adam Nielsen via linux-aus <linux-aus at lists.linux.org.au> wrote:
> 
>  
> > https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/02/visionfive-2-impressions.html
> > 
> > Some of this recent RISC-V hardware seems pretty good.
> 
> I had a look into it as I hadn't heard about this before.  So the main
> benefit over something like a Raspberry Pi seems to be that the RISC-V
> architecture is open and doesn't require royalty payments like ARM does.
> 
> One of the big sticking points with the Pi was that the graphics
> hardware was closed for a long time, and it took years before Broadcom
> could be convinced to release documentation for it.  I can't find
> anything about how the graphics hardware works on this board, and
> whether it requires any binary blobs or custom kernel modules.  If
> OpenGL hardware acceleration just works out of the box with a vanilla
> kernel/userspace then that's definitely a plus from an open source
> perspective.
> 
> Cheers,
> Adam.
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