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Feb. 14th, 2023 10:49 amTwice now, the professor has demonstrated a lack of comprehension of the concept of a broken link. So apparently you can have a PhD and somehow miss this concept. Maybe no one knows what a 404 is anymore.
Started writing a disk image to a micro SD card last night for the MangoPi, a small *Pi style RISC-V (please can we write RiSC-V?) single board computer with an attractive mauve PCB. A few major Linux distros (but not yet Slackware sadly) support the Allwinner D1 boards like this, and the three major BSDs added RISC-V as a supported platform and are working on supporting more devices. So far devices have been extremely overpriced devboards by companies that only produced a few then stopped then started working on a next gen version that they only produced a few of, then stopped, which has annoyed the pants off of everyone involved. Alibaba got in to the game when US tariffs on China made licensing ARM painful, and producing billions of small ARM cores for embedded applications is now a big part of China's industry. Then, very rapidly, pricepoint dropped from the $2,000 range to the $10 range, and supply is reliable instead of a handful of units. By luck for Alibaba, this just preceded Raspberry Pi having a spectacular social media melt-down and mass-blocking people who called them out on apparently endorsing the RPi for spying on people, which they refused to retract or even clarify in any way.
Anyway, it didn't show video on my big monitor after trying a few images, so I thought the unit was defective, but then on a lark, I tried it on the projector, and it immediately worked, though stuff online warned to be patient waiting for video to bootstrap (in one of the goofier computer architecture patterns, video chips now load their firmware from the SD card and use it to bootstrap the CPU which then bootstraps the video chip in to showing video, so you don't get video out of the thing unless/unless everything is bootstrapped and working and no chip does what it's name implies). I don't know if that's the case here. Broadcom RPis do that, hence the infamous "binary blob". And RPi being a little too eager to shave pennies off by allowing their boards to be encumbered by a binary blob you have to agree not to reverse engineer should have been a warning sign. Looking closer at the monitor, it has an HDMI->DVI cable and a DVI port but no HDMI. I probably did the same thing with a Pi and forgot all about it. So, anyway, Linux on a MangoPi. Yay! RISC-V, as in the original RISC, as in BSD, came out of Berkeley, so looking forward to running *BSD on this thing.
Started writing a disk image to a micro SD card last night for the MangoPi, a small *Pi style RISC-V (please can we write RiSC-V?) single board computer with an attractive mauve PCB. A few major Linux distros (but not yet Slackware sadly) support the Allwinner D1 boards like this, and the three major BSDs added RISC-V as a supported platform and are working on supporting more devices. So far devices have been extremely overpriced devboards by companies that only produced a few then stopped then started working on a next gen version that they only produced a few of, then stopped, which has annoyed the pants off of everyone involved. Alibaba got in to the game when US tariffs on China made licensing ARM painful, and producing billions of small ARM cores for embedded applications is now a big part of China's industry. Then, very rapidly, pricepoint dropped from the $2,000 range to the $10 range, and supply is reliable instead of a handful of units. By luck for Alibaba, this just preceded Raspberry Pi having a spectacular social media melt-down and mass-blocking people who called them out on apparently endorsing the RPi for spying on people, which they refused to retract or even clarify in any way.
Anyway, it didn't show video on my big monitor after trying a few images, so I thought the unit was defective, but then on a lark, I tried it on the projector, and it immediately worked, though stuff online warned to be patient waiting for video to bootstrap (in one of the goofier computer architecture patterns, video chips now load their firmware from the SD card and use it to bootstrap the CPU which then bootstraps the video chip in to showing video, so you don't get video out of the thing unless/unless everything is bootstrapped and working and no chip does what it's name implies). I don't know if that's the case here. Broadcom RPis do that, hence the infamous "binary blob". And RPi being a little too eager to shave pennies off by allowing their boards to be encumbered by a binary blob you have to agree not to reverse engineer should have been a warning sign. Looking closer at the monitor, it has an HDMI->DVI cable and a DVI port but no HDMI. I probably did the same thing with a Pi and forgot all about it. So, anyway, Linux on a MangoPi. Yay! RISC-V, as in the original RISC, as in BSD, came out of Berkeley, so looking forward to running *BSD on this thing.
