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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

No to a fixed tech stack. And no to this dual kernel nonsense. As someone who is exhausted with all the terrible ideas in industrial automation, I am not interested.

As for the hardware: please stop endorsing devicetree nonsense and demand discoverable hardware. Enough already with the random per-SoC kernel madness. Did Risc-v learn nothing? MAKE AN ACTUAL PLATFORM with standards for booting and hardware discoverability. Make hardware standard and stop rearranging the register furniture between versions and manufactures.

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I cannot believe that nobody is addressing this. CHRP and ARC, for instance, are decades-old examples.

As much as I think ACPI and uEFI are messy kludges that should be taken out back and shot twice, I'd take them any day over yet another vendor kernel with undocumented Linux drivers no one will give a damn about in few years. Even with AI you're still SOL if you can't get docs to write reliable drivers.

I keep wondering if there's a market for semiconductor products like this:

"Our stuff is not the fastest, not the cheapest, not the most power-efficient...but we're within 50% of the price of the ones that are...and ours come with sufficient documentation (not under NDA!) for anyone to write a driver for!"

I know someone building a dual core RISC-V SoC that is along similar lines. He has a prototype working in an FPGA and planning to get actual silicon fabbed once he gets it to a satisfactory state. The idea is to be a simple no-frills SoC with enough hardware to run a desktop class OS, have a booting and hardware discovery standard, and well documented to make OS porting simple. He does a lot of low level systems work, network hardware, and security expert. I'll have to poke him at some point to see if he's still working on it.

What sort of IP block would one use for a GPU/display controller? AFAICT, all of those are covered by some licensing deal that probably comes with an NDA...

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