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Comment by kfihihc | Hacker News Reader

SDK：https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2

Docs: https://doc-en.rvspace.org/Doc_Center/visionfive_2.html

Looks pretty good opensource-wise, right? Some linux fork with ton of patches but hopefully most of that will get upstreamed, and except that I found no weird blobs or proprietary crap.

I think it will push to upstream ASAP.

I haven't looked at the v2 but they seemed to be doing an alright job at getting things upstreamed with the v1. the only thing i remember seeing that wasn't very good in that regard was the neural net stuff that they had and that seemed more from just issues getting the hardware working than any nda or lack of desire to do it. I'd hope that the v2 is similarly worked through even if it needs some non-upstream patches at the start just because it's new hardware and it takes time.

It seems like many SoCs (also in ARM space) advertise '2 TOPS' or however many TOPS neural processors integrated in the silicon... but the actual number of SoCs where those coprocessors can be used in Linux seems to be very low.

yea it's a shame that it seems to be the normal state of things still. Based on the fact that so many of them have the exact same specs I think it's probably all the same (or only a few) vendors that make that part of the silicon/IP and everyone is just copying it without ever planning much around the support.

Still no sign of an actual Technical Reference Manual or any other detailed documentation on the SoC (registers, peripherals, etc). A big pile of Linux patches, while better than nothing, is a poor substitute for actual documentation.

SiFive does provide docs for the core complex (processors, cache, irq controller, etc), but that doesn't cover any SoC-specific peripherals.

Agreed. But I feel like that is still a step ahead of RPi where you get random firmware blobs for the GPU without which it won't even boot.

It's definitely nicer to have source than a bunch of opaque binaries. (Is there source for the full boot path? Sounds like they have patches for OpenSBI and u-boot -- didn't see if there was source or docs for the on-die boot rom.)

I just find the "all you need is Linux patches" approach annoying. There are BSD variants and little experimental and homebrew OSes out there that would be fun to run on a capable RISC-V SBC and even if you are using Linux it's still nice to have some documentation to refer to beyond whatever the silicon vendor implemented in various driver patches.

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