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On 06/21/2018 01:14 AM, Timothy Pearson wrote:
On 06/20/2018 09:13 PM, Taiidan@gmx.com wrote:
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/motherboards-chipsets/1021175...
The board costs almost as much as a significantly faster and with much more features (IOMMU!) TALOS 2 Lite so I think it is not really worth buying right now for someone like me but I am still very curious about it.
- Unlike the usual crappy SOC products like this there is an available
sexy expansion board which contains not one but two PCI-e slots and various other expansion options including SATA...which all really should have came standard. But unfortunately once you buy all the extras that make it usable you could have bought a very nice T2 setup so this is only for the die-hard hero developers and early adopters. (But I wish I had the cash for both!)
My questions:
Is it possible to do normal stuff like browse the internet and watch a film via video acceleration if you pop in a decent graphics card?
Are there absolutely no binary blobs? Not even for the NIC? It is difficult to find NIC ASIC's that don't have blobs and with RISCV's unfortunate lack of an IOMMU this is a very big security issue for RISCV. At least with the TALOS 2 there is POWER-IOMMU to isolate it from doing anything evil and various people are working on a libre replacement which will benefit the entire libre community and anyone that likes cheap+good nics.
Whats the deal with SMM? What a shame they thought to add it.
I really hope this succeeds and that they eventually add an IOMMU.
Their bootloader is a blob in ROM, for what it's worth. They also will not release source for it [1]. I haven't looked further since that alone is a dealbreaker for an "open" / auditable chip.
Correction: it's the pre-boot loader that's the problem. POWER neatly sidesteps that since the chip doesn't use any pre-reset code per se, and in fact goes through a lengthy process to reset all the latches as part of the open source boot code (see scan rings, etc.).
I'd expect more, a *lot* more, from RISC-V to compensate for its lack of performance and other features. Seeing the only fabbed general purpose chip (AFAIK) be more closed than a closed-ISA competitor is not encouraging at this stage.
Just my personal $0.02 here, not speaking for Raptor overall :)
- -- Timothy Pearson Raptor Engineering +1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line) +1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard) https://www.raptorengineering.com