Framework ships RISC-V board for its 13" laptops along with "boardless" laptop chassis.
With soldered RAM and eMMC storage, this is not “a consumer-ready experience.”…
Can someone shut up the edgy guys trying to play Nostradamus? Go play with your x86 and overpriced nvidia RTX cards that you use only to run one lame game. People building the future don't care about your prejudices.
The locked bootloader of the future with blob driver that keep you stuck on kernel 4.16 forever?
Just how much of a regression will this future bring? Yes, I am very bitter to have discovered my phone is not rootable, if that's the future tgen fuck the future.
The SOC uses U-Boot to boot. The Imagination GPU is more of a problem, but there's work underway to get an open source driver fully working. I've got my own kernel and mesa running on multiple dev boards and, while I can't run a full desktop with mesa on that PowerVR driver yet, I have been able to render some basic things with it. I can, however, install a 6.6 kernel and some userspace binaries to get full acceleration ITMT.
This isn't really ready for standard consumer use anyway. The point of this is basically as a glorified developer board, which was exactly what I bought it for.
Don't assume Qualcomm's general hostility to user control and freedom is representative of all non-x86 systems.
This system isn't like that at all. It's usable with mainline Linux and mainline U-Boot and has no proprietary driver blobs. Granted, RISC-V has some more progress to make in terms of boot image standardization, and this board in particular uses an old SoC from three years ago (JH7110) which predates a lot of improvements that have been happening to various intercompatibility-focused RISC-V standards.
For some of the most recent ARM systems (notably excluding Qualcomm junk), I can write a single installation image for a Linux distro of my choice to a USB drive and then boot that single USB drive through UEFI on several completely different systems by completely different vendors. Ampere, Nvidia, and more. ARM's SystemReady spec results in exactly the same user-friendly process you're used to on x86.
The RISC-V ecosystem isn't there yet though its very recent RISC-V BRS (Boot and Runtime Services) spec promises to bring that for near-future hardware. But this DeepComputing board doesn't have that and doesn't have some other features (vector instructions, RVA22/23, etc) that are very likely to become the minimum requirements for several RISC-V Linux distros in the not too distant future.
I'm sure they care about your butthurt-ass comment. lmao
I don't care about them or their shitty opinion, if you did not understand me
Reminder, you can play QUAKE on RISC-V, wooohoooo
Boardless? What, like, components connected directly to the chassis instead?
That sounds like ass.
It's just the chassis, screen, battery, and keyboard. You would just buy one of their boards separately to go in it, or make one yourself I suppose.
Ah okay, thank you for explaining it to me.
Nice to see! Baby steps and all that. Getting RISC-V to a consumer-level state is still a pretty gargantuan task that has a lot of catch-up to do, but it's walking along its path steadily.
I would have rather seen an ARM Linux board for a more modest cost
If someone who makes ARM hardware wants to make a mainboard, I'd imagine Framework will work with them under the same conditions they're working with DeepComputing on the RISC-V one.
From what I can see, arm Linux itself is still a very small market so I don't see how a small company could work on it and make a profit from that. Maybe once it becomes more mainstream and there is a bigger demand for it, they would definitely consider it. I would rather have them focus on what they have and expand their production, cost and sales region at the moment.
A $200 board with soldered 8GB RAM and 64GB storage.
It is not marketed for consumers. It's a development board, and the first one at that. Check the videos from the team, they are on YouTube.
Didn’t NT 3.x or 4.x run on a RISC CPU back in the day?
Yes it supported PPC and MIPS, which are RISC platforms.
The NT kernel is built on top of a hardware abstraction layer, which should make it easier to port it to different architectures.
Yeah, porting the kernel is the "easy" part for any OS. Its the user space and building up a software ecosystem for the new architecture that is a pain in the ass.
Gotta say, that is the most technical picture ever posted from lemmynsfw
To be fair, most/all kernels are written on a hardware abstraction layer, although lot of that kernel was built off of VMS… 😂
Alpha, yes, and modern Windows has been ported to ARM.
And MIPS too. NT 3.1, 3.5, 4.0 all saw MIPS, Alpha, and x86 releases.
