Re: RISC-V is giving away developer boards

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sat, May 01, 2021 at 06:14:14AM +0200, Bengt Richter wrote:
> Could some riscv-model-version.scm be written to use qemu to create
> an exact virtual metal RISC-V board (of the kind being sampled, for starters)
> for use on our laptops and PCs?
> 
> I think that might get more people involved, and would ideally produce
> images that would "just work" on the bare metal boards.
> 
> Maybe guix could become a preferred RISC-V development environment :)
> 
> Thoughts?

QEMU supports RISC-V and boots. Currently there are some Linux
development images floating around. A port should be possible.

But I think that real hardware is a major incentive. Besides industry
may pick up interest in our work (offering free boards shows they want
more development) if it runs on actual hardware. GNU Mes was ported by
Danny to arm64, so the port should not be too hard and Jan and
colleagues are happy to help. One can even apply for a grant at NLNet
that pays for a year of work:

https://nlnet.nl/news/2021/20210401-call.html

Note that GNU Mes kicked off with such a grant, as well as the arm
port.  We are happy to help with writing the grant too.

RISC-V is very exciting and will be performant. It is small, runs
cooler and therefore many more independent cores fit on the dye. Think
GPU without the disadvantages. Next to IoP RISC-V will power desktops
and perhaps supercomputers.

Pj.