Others have pointed out economic problems with producing hardware, which is fair, but another big issue is standardization.
There is no RISC-V equivalent of BIOS / UEFI, multiboot, etc. We take it for granted that all motherboards and all bootable drives 'just work'. That kind of consistency is important for consumer desktop PCs (less so for rasberry-pi type machines).
This is being worked on, and I think a stable specifications are not too far away. I imagine it will still take firmware developers a long time to create motherboards that fit the spec, considering they are starting from scratch. Here is a recent presentation about the state of booting RISC-V[1].
The Unix platform spec group is working on this. Meetings every month. https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-unixplatformspec You have to join up as an individual membership, which is free for open source software developers.
We have open-source UEFI and openfirmware implementations already; is it really any more complicated then porting one and populating what I understand to be fairly standard interfaces for exposing device information to the operating system? Like... I'm sure it's not actually that easy, but what's the hard part once you've got working code execution from anyting resembling a normal compile chain?
Quite possibly; I only intended to comment on booting/firmware issues. It depends on your goal, too; I'd be quite happy to see RISC-V servers (headless) and desktops (separate video card). Basically, give me a 100% libre SoC/CPU+motherboard and I'm personally happy to worry about the rest later. Also depending on your specific goals and ideology, there's no reason you couldn't make a RISC-PI that just licensed a proprietary video core; that'd still make you more open-source than today's Pi, which has a proprietary CPU and GPU.
Comments
Others have pointed out economic problems with producing hardware, which is fair, but another big issue is standardization.
There is no RISC-V equivalent of BIOS / UEFI, multiboot, etc. We take it for granted that all motherboards and all bootable drives 'just work'. That kind of consistency is important for consumer desktop PCs (less so for rasberry-pi type machines).
This is being worked on, and I think a stable specifications are not too far away. I imagine it will still take firmware developers a long time to create motherboards that fit the spec, considering they are starting from scratch. Here is a recent presentation about the state of booting RISC-V[1].
[1]https://content.riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Summit_...
The Unix platform spec group is working on this. Meetings every month. https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-unixplatformspec You have to join up as an individual membership, which is free for open source software developers.
We have open-source UEFI and openfirmware implementations already; is it really any more complicated then porting one and populating what I understand to be fairly standard interfaces for exposing device information to the operating system? Like... I'm sure it's not actually that easy, but what's the hard part once you've got working code execution from anyting resembling a normal compile chain?
I suspect GPU / display controller and associated licensing and patents are an even bigger obstacle.
Quite possibly; I only intended to comment on booting/firmware issues. It depends on your goal, too; I'd be quite happy to see RISC-V servers (headless) and desktops (separate video card). Basically, give me a 100% libre SoC/CPU+motherboard and I'm personally happy to worry about the rest later. Also depending on your specific goals and ideology, there's no reason you couldn't make a RISC-PI that just licensed a proprietary video core; that'd still make you more open-source than today's Pi, which has a proprietary CPU and GPU.