> Frankly, that is how Plan 9 was initially created; they looked at the existing ISAs and machines they had, and generalized over those.
Can you explain more of what you mean? What generalizations are you talking about and how are they preventing work on RISC-V? > There is a software abstraction to cater for general purpose software: SBI. If you don't like it, ignore it and create your own stuff. It's trivial to do, just tedious. .. snip ... > Feel free to design your own chip if you know better and want to prove it, or join RISC-V International to try to steer it in whatever way you want. All hardware has some amount of suck. As you have correctly stated, hardware vendors give little care to how easy it is to implement support for OS developers. However typically there is some other factors which push down the scales in the favor of supporting it. Hardware availability, cool-ness factor, performance, etc. Chip producers getting to run amok in implementation details and saving 0.0005 cents per chip does not sound "cool" to me, the performance is nothing really to write home about, and no one has these things that didn't go out specifically to find them. An old thinkpad / shitbox amd64 OEM is going to be: more standardized, more performant, and typically does not require a custom kernel (or modifications to an existing one) to get booting. The amd64 ISA has some warts, but I think the pain is way overblown, most users do not have to care at all the ISA their system runs. I would much rather folks grab these older amd64 OEM's that are on their way to the dump (because of the new Windows11 hardware depreciation timeline), then buy some risc-v chip that is barely more than a toy and conversation piece. I am being a bit tongue in cheek here, I know there are use cases for these tiny chips in terms of power draw, size, etc However in my experience of watching people walk in to 9front over the past couple years, this is a very small percentage of use cases. I see people ask about running on pi's not because they like the pi but because the thing has been collecting dust in their drawer otherwise. The idea of writing a bunch of code to support a constantly rotating list of chips is not attractive, that's why I stopped working on the risc-v userspace for 9front. TLDR Sure RISC_V can suck as much as it wants, and its does not have to be for OS developers, but if it brings nothing worth of interest to OS developers then why should anyone bother? At its current state, it seems like just another axis for more soon-to-be-ewaste toys. But this is just like my opinion man, and I'm a bit of a hypocrite considering I have a half finished power64 port I did for nothing but novelty. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tbf390d3a51f65cdf-Mab826b8a926a7f75a14b2df4 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
