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:

and the Pine64 Star64 has a community-maintained Armbian image.

Does anyone here have a RISC-V single-board computer doing anything practical for you?

  • nickwitha_k (he/him)
    3•9 months ago

    I’m intending to use an Oasis for a NAS and virtualization host. If it plays nice, maybe put together a cluster.

    I’ve been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn’t suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.

    Right there with you. I didn’t have a console as a kid so, I’m pretty bad at fighting games. Have been holding back a bit in the MCUs as well but, mainly due to time constraints and waiting for my new hobby dev system to arrive. But, have a good number of plans for MCUs and other things - hopefully the SG2380 gets a bare chip release, like the SG2000/2002 because I want to try making a motherboard/SOM to move towards a fully FOSHW computer (pretty sure that the SG2380 isn’t going to be OSHW initially but, being fully-compliant should be a good place to start).