Solar 3D Printers Home Assistant Electronics Meshtastic RISC-V Local Weather
RISC, RISC is good.
I'm starting an adventure on RISC-V. I purcahsed myself an Orange Pi RV2. I know the Orange Pi "Company" gets a lot of flak for only focusing on hardware, and leaving the software part up to the community. I've previously had some ARM based Orange Pis. Actually a lot. I had a Orange Pi Zero Cluster for awhile, along with a Orange Pi One Plus. These ran my projects, apps and home. I was lucky to use them via Armbian and not have to worry about Orange Pi not updating their images. Those Orange Pis have been sold off and I now use a large x86/x64 server for the bulk of my projects.
The RV2 features a processor that I wanted to get my hands on. Orange Pi had SpaceMIT relabel their K1 processor to Ky X1. Odd choice, but I think they wanted to stand out? Either way. It's actually a SpaceMIT K1. This is their first RVV 1.0 CPU. Its compliant with RVA22, and only has the V from the RVA23. While I will be a fanboi and swarm their new K3 processor when it launches, the K1 is a great start. The K1 features 8 cores of SpaceMITs x60 series. It can handle up to 16GB RAM, but the RV2 features 8GB. There are other boards out there with the full 16GB; Milk-V Jupiter for example. The CPU also has PCIe 2.0 and a GPU from Imagination.
The plan with this board is to push it to it's limits. I ordered along with the board some adapters. I'm going to break out one of the M.2 M-Key slots to a full PCIe slot. This is to run an external GPU with better kernel support, AMD. I also ordered myslef an adapter to add a SFF port to split out into SATA. The plan is to utilize the system to its limits. I want to know what I can do, and what I can't do.
OS wise, Orange Pi suffers. If the board isn't popular with the 'community' then almost no development happens on the software side. Sometimes the boards have quirks that just make it unable to work with mainline. Thankfully the RV2 does feature the K1 and it's pretty darn close to being 100% on mainline. Obviously you'll need to either copy the DTB or compile your own, but that's easy stuff. I plan on running SpaceMITs OS, BianBu OS. They are doing a great job with updates and making the functions of the K1 just work.
I'll update this more as I get the unit, and play with it.
