HiFive1: A RISC-V-based, Open-Source, Arduino-Compatible Development Kit
Two points: a short question and a longer theory about why only 16KB.<p>The question: how viable is an open-source, publicly-auditable secure boot implementation? Not TPM theater or whatever, but a hardened hardware configuration that could be used to implement <i>truly</i> verifiable boot.<p>(If anyone from RISC-V is reading this, I think there is a very noteworthy amount of money in building a <i>truly</i> securely bootable reference design. Hopefully lots of people have already told you that.)<p>--<p>Next, regarding why only 16KB RAM...<p>I&#x27;m very interested in the potential of open source ISA, but admittedly completely ignorant about chip design.<p>With this in mind, I have a theory that the manufacturers deliberately provided a ridiculously low amount of RAM in order to make it impossible[1] to run Linux on it and so keep it out of the mass market.<p>Considering the CPU is full 320MHz I don&#x27;t think this is because they have some other product up their sleeve. Rather, looking at the fact that this is the first marketed product they have available that&#x27;s an actual real chip (!!), I would expect that either the chip itself and&#x2F;or the chipset likely has bugs in it. They&#x27;ve gone through many internal revisions, and now they feel comfortable with putting the chipset out there for public testing to get bugreports from the field.<p>My thinking is that applications that will play nice with 16KB of RAM will stress the CPU out significantly less than full Linux would, similarly to how doing basic tasks on a faulty x86 PC may work for years but compiling GCC will find broken bits in RAM sooner or later.<p>There&#x27;s also the fact that such projects are also generally quieter as a whole than the thundering herd of people wanting to run Linux on things.<p>Don&#x27;t forget, RISC-V has been nothing more than a bunch of VHDL for years, running on &quot;perfect&quot; FPGAs that don&#x27;t require you to think about low-level electrical niggles and whatnot. If I&#x27;m understanding correctly, this is the first time a real RISC-V chip run has been done (?) and made available to the market.<p>Considering the success of ARM (or, more generically, the market sector of &quot;little PCBs that run Linux&quot;), RISC-V needs to stay competitive and attractive - and full Linux that constantly oopses in mm.c will make RISC-V look real bad real fast. I definitely want the ISA to thrive, and if my assumptions are correct capping the RAM makes an inelegant-yet-elegant sort of sense.<p>I expect RISC-V will be running Linux on real fabbed chips within the next two years.<p>[1]: Well, <i>practically</i> impossible. If you don&#x27;t mind 300KB&#x2F;s RAM (yes, KB&#x2F;s, not MB&#x2F;s) there&#x27;s always <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dmitry.gr&#x2F;index.php?r=05.Projects&amp;proj=07. Linux on 8bit" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dmitry.gr&#x2F;index.php?r=05.Projects&amp;proj=07. Linux ...</a> :D