[zik]

> The public doesn't have access to RISC-V hardware and it won't have access anytime soon.

There's plenty of RISC-V hardware around, and anyone can buy it. eg. [1]

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/RISC-V_hardware_list

[IshKebab]

He mean "desktop grade" hardware. Something that you might compile an entire distro on.

Those are all SBCs, and slow ones at that. Nobody is compiling an entire Linux distro on something like a Raspberry Pi 3.

[kibwen]

> Nobody is compiling an entire Linux distro on something like a Raspberry Pi 3.

The RISC-V mainboard for the Framework is 4-core 1.5 GHz with 8 GB of RAM. That's leagues better than the hardware that people were compiling Linux on in the 90s and early 2000s.

[usrnm]

You don't need to compile on the same hardware, cross-compilation is a viable option

[dlcarrier]

They're targeting them, though. I used to use the Rasberry Pi Zero line for embedding into projects, even though it is much, much more difficult to get than the Pi Pico, because the Zero series can run Linux, opening up a lot more software.

I've switched to SBCs based on the Bouffalo Lab BL808 and more recently Sophgo SG2000 SoCs, which are in the same form factor and price range as the Pi Pico, but run full Linux. They're nowhere near as fast or capable as a desktop, laptop, or even phone/tablet processor, but they're much faster than the RP2040 and much easier to port to. I even compile target applications on them, although not the Linux kernel itself.

[geor9e]

In the early development phase, you'd compile the OS on a big non-RISCV desktop PC and target those little SBC boards, then flash it onto them and boot and test. In the prototype phase, you get the real hardware, but will probably still compile from something else. By the time the real hardware is ready to be released to the public, the OS for it will probably already be finished and ship with it.