Linux Display Driver Worked On For A Popular & Low-Cost RISC-V SoC

[Paradigm Shifter]

The poor PCIe support for that SoC really is unfortunate. But still, my visionfive fully boots from NVMe and thats very nice compared to many common ARM SoCs.

Beats running off a microSD card...

[Quackdoc]

Why? For storage, 500 MB/s is nearly as fast as the top SATA 3 speed you'll see in practice. I'm still using SATA 3 SSDs in a couple PCs today, and they're totally fine.

For graphics, PCIe 2.0 x1 should be fine for desktop graphics. For video playback, you could do 1080p 60 fps software decoding and barely cram it over the bus at that speed. And if you're using the GPU to decode, then you could comfortably do any resolution/framerate combination.

when limited to pcie 2.0, you probably wont actually get that much more performance then the on board gpu for anything that needs to do copying. the gpus should be pretty OK when we get drivers for them, nothing spectacular, but I doubt a pcie 2.0 x1 will be that much better. if you are looking for a riscv device to actually plop a gpu in to use, then waiting is a better bet

[ayumu]

when limited to pcie 2.0, you probably wont actually get that much more performance then the on board gpu for anything that needs to do copying. the gpus should be pretty OK when we get drivers for them, nothing spectacular, but I doubt a pcie 2.0 x1 will be that much better. if you are looking for a riscv device to actually plop a gpu in to use, then waiting is a better bet

There's a few videos on youtube where people run games (native or via box64), as well as emulators. Even with the pcie bottleneck, it's much better than SoC's integrated graphics.

[uid313]

GCN cards are definitely supported but not everything after. We have patches to make RDNA2 cards working on a SiFive Unmatched, but I'm not sure if it is upstreamed. Intel i915 driver does not even compile against anything not x86 because it is directly using x86/asm.h in the driver. The newer xe driver is theoretically compile-able against RISC-V, but I guess nobody has tested that on RISC-V. If I remembered it correctly someone had success on arm systems.

I was more thinking of integrated Intel Xe och AMD RDNA3 graphics in the CPU, not a discreet PCI Express graphics card.