Ubuntu 22.10 Aiming to Support the $16 Sipeed LicheeRV RISC-V Board | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 22.10 Aiming to Support the $16 Sipeed LicheeRV RISC-V Board

phoronix.com

72 pointsleephillips16 comments

Anyone here looking to use this in IoT projects, can you please say what you're looking at doing, and why you'd use this versus a Raspberry Pi?

I'm confused why anyone would use a M.2 card in an IoT application.

Is this a development board?

This is not an M.2 card. This is a way to interface with a carrier board containing more peripherals using the M.2 connector.

Development boards such as these can be also deployed as-is with "production" carrier boards.

The industry has reused connectors such as DIMMs and M.2s, and the main focus is being able to swap only the daughter-board to go up and down requirements and constraints as the project advances.

These kinds of designs are good to drop into things like kiosk PCs and digital signage, applications where you don't need a ton of processing power but still require a full stack of network connectivity. You could upgrade the compute module to better versions with faster processors or more memory depending on your needs. These kinds of compute module designs aren't very helpful for IoT designs since you need a carrier board. If you need to make your own carrier board to fit your design, why not just use an already existing SoC board that has everything you need?

The difference is that it's easier to make 2 M.2 connectors and a screwpost on a board than it is to add a SoC, power management, and all the other baggage that comes with it.

It's a System On Module (SoM). It's designed to fit into a carrier board which will pass through all of the pins to the application-specific peripherals. The connector type is incidental, it's just to pass through the signals. No compatibility with the conventional M.2 use will be intended or implied.

What other connector would you use to break out a bunch of pins? These are under a $1 in quantity and can break out 60+ pins per connector.

They are vastly cheaper than the corresponding .100" connectors to break these out for the same number of pins. And they have much better signal integrity.

An additional advantage to this arrangement is that you can push everything non-essential off the "module" (note that the sockets are on the expansion board--the CPU module is just PCB fingers). Given the current semiconductor supply chain idiocies, this certainly won't hurt.

The only other option I can think of would be a DIMM socket and that would be quite a bit more expensive.

This product looks comparable in both price and performance to the Raspberry Pi Zero WH.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/

This is what I was going to ask about; if anybody had used Pi Zeros in a commercial product and if they would consider this (which is more expensive.)

I don’t know if it’s still as bad but Raspberry Pi’s used to have a bad habit of destroying the SD cards that contain their file system, which is a big problem in commercial products.

I use side projects as learning exercises and RISC-V assembly is something I am interested in learning. (Running an emulator is not as cool).

I have no particular side projects in mind, but if this does get support, I'll probably buy one and come up with something fun to do.

Ubuntu became too heavy and bloated for that kind of usecase

Unless they have a special distribution without the bloat?

Ubuntu Core is the only one i remember, and even that one is pretty fat (~250mb)

Also where do he see 16 USD? on that aliexpress link all i can see is 20 USD for the 512mb one, and that's without shipping..

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803408560538.html is $16.90 from the sipeed store

Without tax, I assume. For people in other regions tax will be added now.

I don't know about userspace bloat but they do have a VM kernel that I appreciate. It's small and only has basic virtual device drivers. As a bonus you don't need to download the huge firmware package every few days. Does Core have a special kernel or regular one with the firmware package?

It has been my experience that performance differences are so small that unless you have a specialized, monetized, task the differences are irrelevant.

Those tasks won't typically be run on a $20 SBC.

For example the spread between compiling a modest program on a modest PC might be 75 seconds on Ubuntu and 72 seconds on Clear.

So you save 4% on compilations, minutes if you do hundreds of compilations per day.

But boy oh boy it is much easier to find an article on how to accomplish an administration task for Ubuntu than it is Clear.

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