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tliltocatltoday at 12:09 PM0 repliesview on HN

What we have of RISC-V mostly goes ARM route. The problem isn't ISA itself, it's the peripherals. Most x86 motherboards comes with ACPI that (while being an unholy mess of a specification) allows vendors to provide bytecode drivers for simple stuff like power regulators and fan controls. In theory ACPI and UEFI are cross-platform, but no SoC or platform vendor seems to bother. RISC-V embraced opensource which means you get a declarative devicetree specification, but no runnable drivers to go with it. So all peripheral drivers must be upstream to be usable. That's of course not realistic because SoC vendors don't give a shit about your problems (and because Linux isn't the one and only OS!). Interestingly, devicetree, originally conceived as a part of OpenFirmware, was supposed to go with a Forth virtual machine exactly for this reason, but that part never made it to RISC-V.

Paradoxically, Linux core maintainers prefer the ARM situation (as do RMS-grade FOSS fans). For them going x86 route means constantly getting blame for crappy code they didn't wrote. Not that I'm unsympathetic, but it really goes against users' interests. And again, BSDs and smaller OSes often simply doesn't have resources to support the myriads of platform hardware.