[Info-vax] Open hardware

[Dan Cross]

In article <uvrp8p$2daa7$1 at dont-email.me>,
Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>On 2024-04-18, John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> As for RISC-V, who is offering RISC-V 64-bit servers or cloud instances
>> as of now? I count Scaleway, since early March, but they're bare metal
>> servers, *not* Linux ready to run. RISC-V has a lot of hype, somewhat
>> questionable potential, and not very much in service that's suitable for
>> VMS. 
>>
>
>RISC-V only supplies part of the solution. There's only limited utility
>to the CPU architecture being open when the rest of the hardware, GPU,
>onboard memory setup, etc, is still behind heavily restricted datasheets
>and manuals.
>
>What I would really like to see is a _completely_ open board, including
>GPU and peripheral/memory documentation, with the documentation written
>in enough detail that you could in theory write your own OS from scratch
>without ever having to sign a single NDA or beg for access to some
>restricted documentation.

Yup, this.  It's an incredibly hard problem.

Not only for OEMs, but for the component vendors themselves.
Consider that many are buying IP from third party component
vendors that themselves have firmware blobs that they distribute.
Setting up things like IO buses is thorny when you need to do
real signal processing to make it happen.

	- Dan C.