On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 03:05:03PM -0500, ronwirring@Safe-mail.net wrote:
-------- Original Message -------- From: Jonathan Neuschäferj.neuschaefer@gmx.net Apparently from: arm-netbook-bounces@lists.phcomp.co.uk To: Eco-Conscious Computing arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk Subject: Re: [Arm-netbook] sifive sells a riscv cpu mainboard Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 18:49:36 +0100
On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 12:39:57PM -0500, ronwirring@Safe-mail.net wrote:
Sifive has a mainboard for sale with a running riscv cpu. Many of the devices on the mainboard require non libre software.
What do you mean exactly?
I do not know exactly what I mean. Go to 31.20 in the video to hear what sifive means.
"As I told you, the Freedom Unleashed 540 chip is based on the Freedom platform, but unfortunately, there are things that we can't open-source, for example the IPs that we got from the third-parties, such as the standard cells, the pads, the PLLs, the OTPs, the mask ROMs, the DDR controller PHY, the gigabit MAC."
This is all hardware, not software.
Can you tell if the mainboard is free software foundation compliant?
As far as I understand, yes.
If that is the case, I understood the video wrongly. I got the impression the mainboard requires non libre software to run. Software which makes the mainboard not free software foundation compliant.
At 43.39 in the video they say, they are using an external non libre software graphics card. If we got all of the source code for one of the mali gpu's, could the aforementioned gpu then be used on a riscv mainboard?
This was a regular desktop graphics card, connected over PCIe.
Or in general, can you place a mali gpu on a riscv mainboard?
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.
And since it's ARM MALI, I don't think ARM will license it for use in RISC-V SoCs…
Jonathan Neuschäfer