Do you run anything on a RISC-V processor? - Lemmy
lemmy.ml
Lately I’ve been really liking the idea of having something hosted on a RISC-V machine. RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is a competitor to ARM. The idea of having a something running on an open source operating system, running on an open standard CPU, served from my house, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I was under the impression that most Linux distributions were unstable on RISC-V. Turns out, I’m wrong about that. From a quick search, the following have official Debian images: * Beagleboard Beagle-V Ahead [https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-ahead] * Starfive Visionfive 2 [https://ameridroid.com/products/visionfive-2] * Milk-V Mars [https://milkv.io/mars] and the Pine64 Star64 [https://pine64.com/product-category/star64/] has a community-maintained Armbian image. Does anyone here have a RISC-V single-board computer doing anything practical for you?

(also posted on @selfhost)

RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is an alternative to ARM. I had thought that we were still waiting for a stable Linux distribution on RISC-V devices, but it turns out many RISC-V machines can run Debian already.

Does anyone have a RISC-V device that they use regularly? How has it been working?

  • aarroyoc@lemuria.es
    0·
    7 months ago

    Yes, I have a VisionFive 2 and I use it to host some websites. I have am Arch Linux image compiled by a user in a forum, but the userspace packages are from a RISC-V repository from a other people working in Arch in general.

    I could run my websites but it wasn’t easy at first, because, yes I have Docker but there are almost no images for riscv64, so I had to do some compiling and build images in a local registry. Bu now it works pretty well.

    • tuckerm@supermeter.socialOP
      1·
      7 months ago

      It sounds like the answer to “can I run this application on RISC-V” is very dependent on what the backend for that application is. What’s the backend stack for your websites? Are they static HTML sites, or do they have other components? Someone else mentioned that they built postgres and mariadb Docker images for RISC-V, but I don’t even know which programming languages can be compiled for RISC-V right now.

  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    Definitely interested - is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?

    I’ve been bitten before with a device that “supports” a major distribution, but only if you install our custom pre-built image (good luck auditing what we’ve tweaked) and only with our special pre-built kernel that isn’t even an LTS version, and has a bunch of patches applied to support whatever weird peripherals we decided to throw on the board, and will get exactly 0 updates after the initial release.

    Raspberry Pi gets around this by being big enough to get buy in from vendors (Ubuntu distributes a special kernel + firmware bundle), but support for all the other smaller knock offs seem shaky at best

    • tuckerm@supermeter.socialOP
      1·
      7 months ago

      is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?

      Unfortunately, sounds like “no” currently. The ones that let you install Debian usually provide some kind of custom Debian image for that specific SBC. Like you, I’m not really a fan of that. But apparently there are some desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs coming out. Hopefully that will increase the chance of things getting supported in mainline distros.