The C906 is very slow, but so is, it appears, the Pi Zero.

The good news is that there are a lot of faster options right around the corner. The Pine folks is working on releasing Star64 (quad SiFive FU740 1.5GHz) [1] and I know of at least two other RISC-V SBCs in the pipeline. I'm not quite ready to declare "2022 is the year of the RISC-V desktop" yet though.

[1] https://www.hackster.io/news/pine64-formally-unveils-the-sta...

Note, the FU740 is in-order dual-issue with a comfortable L2 cache.

The Pi Zero uses the same SoC as the original 2012 Raspberry Pi, and it was already long in the tooth even then so that's not really surprising.

Yeah it's already legacy hardware, it should be comparing against the Zero 2 if anything, the original Zero was comically underpowered.

But the speed is all but irrelevant, the issue with these alternative boards is always in software support. No point in using them even if they're twice as fast if I can't apt get anything and have to compile shit from source wasting 10 times as much time. Is there even an arch tag for riscv yet like armhf and arm64? I'd assume there is, but I can't find it and the support is likely to be abysmal this early on.

We are maintaining an Arch Linux RISC-V port with ~85% of all Arch repo's packages ported, see our work at: https://archriscv.felixc.at

Currently we already finished porting Chrome (thanks to openSUSE!) & Firefox, and Libre Office is on the todo list

Oh awesome, thanks for sharing. Some time ago I couldn’t find anything that looked like an active arch port. Any interesting challenges in doing this?

ADD: OpenSUSE! how could I forget. Truly we are spoiled for choice today. I remember not that long ago it was

  * Buildroot

Indeed there're some challenging packages that we've made great efforts to port, and those efforts mainly happened at upstream level: adding RISC-V support for ldc, for chromium V8 (rv64 & rv32, both as joint efforts, great thanks to my college luyahan), for lldb-server (WIP), and crystal (WIP), etc.

As soon as upstreams accept our PRs, all distros with RISC-V port can benifit from them, which IMO sounds like a better porting style than keeping a huge patch in downstream Arch-specific repo :-D

BTW we also have an CI/CD available for upstream opensource developers to monitor their builds: https://ci.rvperf.org

Indeed, Chromium was one of the hard ones. Thanks again for your efforts.

What is "ldc"?

I'll keep an eye on https://archriscv.felixc.at/ and try out the current rootfs.

ldc refers to the LLVM-based D Compiler: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc