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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I've realized that my only interest in RISC-V all along has been the disruptive opportunity to possibly get open and auditable firmware and hardware (for human rights, empowerment, and security).

If AOSP on RISC-V helps promote RISC-V in a way that increases the likelihood of viable open firmware and hardware emerging in the ecology, that's great.

However, if, like some dev boards I've seen, we end up heading down a path of more of the same problem we already have with user-hostile platforms (just musical chairs of who's making the money from it), I'll save myself some trouble, and just keep using x86-64 and ARM.

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Most devices will continue to be blackboxes. Most of the support for RISC-V comes from players looking to [commodotise their complements](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/) and avoid the ARM-licensing tax. They have no interest in openers, just in less material cost and more flexibility for themselves. However, this will allow for a parallel community of open hardware to be built (in a way that you can't due to the patents, licensing, and overall cruft of x86/x86-64) that is compatible with the tools and software that is being built for these ARM-tax dodgers. So you'll be able to build a desktop that runs a fully open RISC-V CPU and board at 10 times the price and half the cost of a blackbox solution and while it will only run at half the speed, you will be able to be a legitimate Windows license for it. That is a realistic dream.

I know it is besides your point but the thought of going through all that and then running windows on it made me laugh.

SBI (in practice, opensbi) has been standardized for years.

UEFI on RISC-V (which is optional and runs after SBI does) was standardized early this year.

The pieces are in place for proper, standardized boot process, way before phones/servers/laptops flood the market.

I think RISC-V is a good position for boot chaos to be entirely avoided.

At least with RISC-V you can always synthesize the core yourself in an fpga. It's vastly easier than it used to be and cheap fpga boards are becoming quite powerful. Something like the upduino board has a low barrier to entry. I'm particularly excited by the artix-7 line which also has open source toolchain support, though i haven't tried it myself yet.

Putting it in an fpga isn't as efficient as using the same area of silicon to make an asic, but for alot of applications it's totally fine. Plus you can actually hack on the architecture to suit your needs. An open and adaptable computing fabric that can be synthesized on demand sounds pretty disruptive to me.

This would be awesome if we had open and auditable FPGAs...

I know theoretically this is a problem, and I've heard people make similar statements, but I'm having a failure of imagination at thinking of specifics.

If you are using a fully open source toolchain what does the threat model actually look like in the real world? Even if a device itself is malicious, what can it actually do to exfiltrate information about what's happening inside it without being incredibly obvious? How can it know what register bits are even of interest given some configuration bitstream? It just seems like there are so many hypotheticals that it isn't worth being concerned about. Would love to be educated about this.

Check out OpenFPGA and RapidSilicon

You should be able to take that AOSP and run it on hardware you designed yourself. Getting RISC-V and AOSP together pulls in thousands of more folks from the mobile phone ecosystem. This can only be a good thing.

The low end always eats the high end, so if AOSP is running on budget RISC-V SoCs, it is only a matter of time before it is encroaching on the middle and highend.

Yup, my neighbor works for ARM and said they people over there who understand RISC-V are sweating.

> it is only a matter of time before it is encroaching on the middle and highend

I'm optimistic. But RISC-V will have to have designs that offer competitive power and area in order to take over even the low end of portable devices.

>But RISC-V will have to have designs that offer competitive power and area in order to take over even the low end of portable devices.

Look at SiFive's offerings. ARM are the ones without competitive power and area, now.

> my only interest in RISC-V all along has been the disruptive opportunity to possibly get open and auditable firmware and hardware

Someone PLEASE explain this to me? How in gods name will an open ISA result in open firmware and standarized hardware??

And what is open ISA anyway? Is MIPS open? How about PowerPC? Or, I don't know.. microblaze??

Because it's a disruption moment, and people will be designing new things around it, and some of those things conceivably might be people getting on some version of the open train, and doing the rest of the system open.

Maybe this could end up rising around some other ISA. The closest I can think of is Raptor's impressive work around IBM Power9, but even the entry-level Blackbird board they did a few years ago is pricey, and I haven't yet seen an explosion of open boards at other price points and configurations. https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

> Because it's a disruption moment, and people will be designing new things around it,

But this is just wishful thinking. There is nothing in riscv that will automatically lead to open fw and open hw.

In fact, from what we have seen so far the big commercial vendors have added the usual secret sauce and we have ended up with development boards that are neither open or standard

Yep. The RISC-V cores themselves will run the same instructions, but there will almost certainly be a lot of proprietary devices on the SoC they reside on. Chip vendors save money by not paying ARM for a license. Maybe that savings will be passed on to customers. Probably not.

You mean like 10 cent RISC-V cores?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33302035

> ... promote RISC-V in a way that increases the likelihood of viable open firmware and hardware emerging in the ecology, that's great.

Guess the most easy/effective way to support this direction is: buy open devices (such as the HiFive Unmatched).

The bigger the community around them grows, the more power their creators will have to make manufacturers produce open hardware devices.

As it looks to me, you can run the Unmatched entirely without closed firmware blobs, right? [1]

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/SiFive/HiFiveUnma...

There is another advantage - price. Since there's no ARM licensing to pay for it's possible to make cheaper devices. This creates some new possibilities particularly at the lower end of the market.

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