[coreboot] RISC-V HiFive Unleashed board added to coreboot - has PCI-e slots via exp board

[Timothy Pearson]

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On 06/21/2018 01:14 AM, Timothy Pearson wrote:
> On 06/20/2018 09:13 PM, Taiidan at gmx.com wrote:
>> https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/motherboards-chipsets/1021175-risc-v-sifive-freedom-unleahsed-540-soc-hifive-unleashed-board-added-to-coreboot
> 
>> 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.
> 
> [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5127
> 

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
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