[Arm-netbook] sifive sells a riscv cpu mainboard

[Jonathan Neuschäfer]

On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 12:18:21PM -0500, ronwirring at Safe-mail.net wrote:
> -------- Original Message --------
> From: Jonathan Neuschäfer<j.neuschaefer at gmx.net>
> Apparently from: arm-netbook-bounces at lists.phcomp.co.uk
> To: Eco-Conscious Computing <arm-netbook at lists.phcomp.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [Arm-netbook] sifive sells a riscv cpu mainboard
> Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2018 00:40:03 +0100
> 
> > On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 03:05:03PM -0500, ronwirring at Safe-mail.net wrote:
[...]
> > > Can you tell if the mainboard is free software foundation
> > > compliant?
> > 
> > As far as I understand, yes.
> 
> Then I got the video wrong. I thought his listing of not open
> source devices about the riscv mainboard would negate
> fsf compliance.

I'm not an expert on FSF compliance (by which you mean compliance to the
criteria of FSF's RYF program, I assume), but the Hifive Unleashed is
better on the Hardware freedom side than any computer that was certified
as "Respects Your Freedom" so far, and (AFAIK) not worse on the software
freedom side.

Whether SiFive (or anyone else) will request RYF certification for the
Hifive Unleased is a separate question, that I cannot answer.

> > No, MALI is (AFAIK) not available as a separate chip, so you can't put
> > it on a board if the SoC doesn't already have it.
> 
> I did not know. Apparently you then cannot buy a bag of
> mali devices?

That's right. You can buy a bag of devices that contain MALI (e.g.
ARM-based SoCs from Allwinner or some other vendors), but not a bag of
devices that contain *only* MALI (i.e. dedicated MALI GPUs).

[ I guess you *could* run a SoC with MALI in it in a PCIe target mode
  and control the MALI remotely over PCIe, and thus use the SoC as sort
  of a "remote MALI" chip, but I guess that's very much besides the
  point. ]


Jonathan Neuschäfer