I for one can’t wait to be running a RISC-V system

  • @cmhe
    link
    English
    2
    edit-2
    11 hours ago

    But as long as they are RISC V chips, then they would run the same software as any other RISC V chips.

    Not necessarily, RISC-V is permissibly licensed, so they could add proprietary extensions, that would make the binaries or even compilers only work with their implementation of the RISC-V ISA.

    Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics would work on RISC-V, and I trust billionaires and huge corporations to enshittify it.

    Big player joins RISC-V, creates design, introduces proprietary extensions, builds compilers that use them, software depend on them, other RISC-V designers need to license them, because the whole platform now depends on them.

    Also based on how complicate it is to port Linux to different SoCs, which at least share a common ISA, it will be much more difficult if you need to support even more RISC-V ISAs with different proprietary extensions, not only in the kernel, but in the toolchain as well.