@satchmoz I don't know much about RISC-V. This is a confession, but I always see it in the context of *BSD folks getting excited, and that ain't me, so I filed it under: "mostly harmless"/

So I will need to look it up, but what are the broad strokes? Why would an above average OCD technologists care about RISC-V? ^_^

@maiki Completely liberated silicon. Not only the instruction set but many of the chips itself are being designed completely in the open with no royalties. Also unlike other such attempts it's goal is to be competitive with proprietary silicon and scale from micro-controllers to general purpose computers.

Its also much cleaner on the instruction set level than x86 and Arm.

Its also going to possibly serve as the foundation of a new waive of SoCs many of which ought to be completely libre.

@clacke @satchmoz to clarify, the "above average" referred to "OCD", at least for me. ^_^

@maiki ARM for example allows for a lot of extensions onto itself as a processor. Most vendors add on custom and standard extensions in their SoCs which are wholly proprietary that they often don't even own the drivers for. Which creates a lot of proprietary extensions which takes years if not decades for the FLOSS community to reverse engineer.

@satchmoz oh, interesting. I haven't gotten into hardware arch to that level, but the custom extensions certainly explain how markets lean towards closed: they are trying to do a value-add in an oversaturated field, despite everyone basically wanting open systems.

@maiki Im not into hardware arch on that level per se, ive just been lurking in enough mailing lists long enough to know the shape of the problem that has been frustrating me as well as you.

@maiki If we get RISC-V right, it will be an architecture where we can avoid that problem outright.

@maiki BSDs are primarily interested in it because it's an architecture linux doesn't own yet and it's got a lot of Academic interest (i.e. Berkley) so there is historic synergy there.

@satchmoz I sometimes wish I had a reason to jump into a BSD, but I have no practical reason. I just lurk around hoping to gain that magic insight via osmosis. GNU + GNOME does it for me.

@maiki I get it. I didn't touch BSD for a long time and I still load NetBSD down with all the #GNU utilities I think it ought to ship it with.

And honestly I like Gnome a lot too. Though I often wish Gnome was more plugged into the rest of the GNU project.

@satchmoz re: GNU/Gnome, yeah, me too. I mean, I kinda get it, but there seems to be a lot of effort for the same things, coming from different angles.

On one hand I wish I had all the eyes on the the code I use, and on the other hand I am glad folks are building to different philosophies.

Still better than monolithic, corporate OS design!

@maiki I think that is part of the the appeal of the BSDs for some. Each #BSD's base system is developed as a unified whole. There isnt a seperate NetBSD bootloader project independent from the kernel independent from the init system. There is just NetBSD.

Same for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.

There is a unity of purpose & a unity as to what the target is there.

That & the target is Unix.

GNU/Linux sometimes targets world domination; & I get that, but sometimes that is at odds with the other goal.