BeagleV-Ahead: Not ready for prime time
Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2023 2:10 pm
As I've mentioned in previous posts here, I've been playing around with the RISC-V architecture with an eye towards writing The Art of RISC-V Assembly Language. To that end, I've previously purchased a StarFive board (under $100) which I was *barely* able to get working sufficiently well to write some short RISC-V assembly code. I sat that project aside because I'm currently in the process of going through the editing of The Art of ARM Assembly and I'm currently writing The Art of ARM Assembly, Volume 2.
Recently, the Beagle folks (of BeagleBone/BeagleBoard fame) released the BeagleV-Ahead, a 64-bit quad-core RISC-V board (around $150). I ordered one to play around with. Sadly, this board is *not* ready for prime time; it is only suitable for kernel hackers who have lots of experience with other Beagle products. The documentation is nonexistent. The variant of Linux OS that ships on the board does not even include GCC and is basically worthless. Multiple attempts to download Ubuntu for the board (based on their one-page website support) have always failed for me. Worse, they only support flashing from some Linux machine (no support for Windows or Mac) and the only Ubuntu machine I have is a parallels window running on my Mac (I haven't tried using a Raspberry Pi, maybe...?)
I suspect this board will be usable in another year or so.
RISC-V support for low-end (less than hundreds and hundreds of dollars) seems to be really lacking. I'd be afraid to spend $600 - $2000 for one of the commercial RISC-V systems, to discover they are less that satisfactory, as well.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Recently, the Beagle folks (of BeagleBone/BeagleBoard fame) released the BeagleV-Ahead, a 64-bit quad-core RISC-V board (around $150). I ordered one to play around with. Sadly, this board is *not* ready for prime time; it is only suitable for kernel hackers who have lots of experience with other Beagle products. The documentation is nonexistent. The variant of Linux OS that ships on the board does not even include GCC and is basically worthless. Multiple attempts to download Ubuntu for the board (based on their one-page website support) have always failed for me. Worse, they only support flashing from some Linux machine (no support for Windows or Mac) and the only Ubuntu machine I have is a parallels window running on my Mac (I haven't tried using a Raspberry Pi, maybe...?)
I suspect this board will be usable in another year or so.
RISC-V support for low-end (less than hundreds and hundreds of dollars) seems to be really lacking. I'd be afraid to spend $600 - $2000 for one of the commercial RISC-V systems, to discover they are less that satisfactory, as well.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde