A $9 Introduction to the RISC-V Future of Computing

Is RISC-V the future of computing? I sure hope so. So I tracked down one of the cheapest Linux-capable SBCs that supports this architecture, the Milk-V Duo. For a listed price of $9 (and selling for $5), this little guy offers a RV64 Linux environment complete with busybox, Ethernet, and a wide assortment of IO rivaling some microcontrollers. Today I'm going to steup the board and start learning about RISC-V computing!

Fundamentally, the RISC-V architecture is a document which describes the binary machine lanuage of a 32, 64, or 128 bit processor with integer and optional floating point support, but it's also symbolic of the shift to open computing for the future, and as a computer engineer I'm excited to learn more about it.

Feel free to chat about my upcoming projects on Discord!

I reached out to Milk-V to make this video, they sent me the board, breakout, and camera free of charge but were otherwise not involved in this video.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:49 - What Is RISC-V?
01:35 - Unboxing
03:06 - First Boot
05:30 - Writing Code
09:29 - RISC-V Assembly
16:38 - Hardware IO
17:18 - Ethernet
19:39 - Kernel Build
22:04 - USB Host
22:52 - Camera
23:20 - RISC and Me

#riscv #computerarchitecture

[MarkEichin]

I love how this turned from "hello world on a cheap new embedded chip" to "summarize and compare 40+ years of instruction set architectures" while still being comprehensible!

[_yadokari]

Spent the first 10 years of my career writing MIPS assembly. RISC-V is so close to it, and I love it.

[merthyr]

Some people might not like having a whole OS for their dev board, but the "Everything is a file" paradigm looks insanely intuitive!

[falazarte]

You are a computer engineer and it shows. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us.

[digitalsparky]

The major benefits of RISC are that it follows the KISS rule rather well, and is also modular IIRC.

[walterpark]

I like RISC-V. It seems highly comprehensible. This board and the work they put in to making it accessible and usable seems exceptional. I'll pick up a couple. And your discussion of it and of ISA's really enhances and completes the package! Thank you!

[stephanschmidt]

Writing code since 40 years, but learned a lot from your video. Very well done.

[arnesteinarson]

As an old "full stack dev" (including assembler on some archs) - it was a joy to listen to your presentation.
The right level and speed for a more tech savvy audience.
Thanks 🙂

[martinhslhw]

Great stuff! Mr Sherlock realized there was some attention being given to something that was not him and came to politely point this out.

[Razor_Burn]

Thanks for sharing as most of the online stuff surrounding this neat RISC-V board is in Chinese. Look forward to future Milk-V content 👍

[PaulSpades]

Man, it's so refreshing to hear about a device from somebody that knows what they're talking about (mips, arm, ppc experience).
Does this little chip have any audio capabilities?

[jojodicus]

small correction: morse code is not a Huffman code, since it doesn't satisfy the prefix-property (meaning that no encoded letter is included at the beginning of another letter), which is the main point of doing Huffman encoding anyway. the benefit of these prefix codes is, that do not have to incorporate separations for letters, since you know exactly when a new symbol starts. there also exist "morse" codes which are prefix codes, but those are not as commonly used/known as the standard version.

small example for the point above:
take the morse sequence .-.
this can be anything from these words: AE, EN, ETE or R
with a prefix code (such as a Huffman code), there would only be one possible translation, even when omitting separation

[itssoaztek]

Fabulous hands-on with affordable hardware I didn't know exist! Very nice explanation at the end about different architectures!
(BTW Big thanx for doing some magic on the audio side of things! Excellent listening experience with this video!)

[jimlynch]

Wow! I'm seriously impressed by your knowledge and, of course, this video. I was as involved with assembly language 50 years ago as you are now. I cut my teeth on the IBM 7074 and the CDC 6000 series. I also dabbled in Z80, 8080, 6800 and 6502. I wrote a rudimentary OS for the 6502 using a Tarbell floppy controller and a couple of 8" floppy drives all in assembly language. So this video took me back. Thanks!

[WobblycogsUk]

I'd love to see more like this. I've recently finished work as full time developer, I never got to do low level stuff but I was always interested. Here's an idea, maybe you could put together a short series of videos, say half a dozen, introducing people to RISC-V and low level development. We could pick up a board like this for cheap it to follow along. Obviously, this is a huge amount of work you'd have at least one person that was really interested :)

[ArnaudMEURET]

I really enjoyed the gentle trip back to asm. 😊

[BartPolot]

This is one of the best videos I've seen in the past few months, at least. Super well explained, useful interjections and lots of info about the different asm variants. Plus the board itself looks super interesting, I just wish there was a European reseller or something. Or that it wasn't sold out...

Again, excellent video, keep up the good work!

[deamit]

a great job on explaning the assembly for each different architecture ^^

[cheebadigga]

So technically we could run statically compiled Go tools on it? Not sure if goc supports RISC-V, but since GCC does, GCCGO should work I guess.

Edit: Just looked it up, there's actually a goc port for RISC-V. Nice!

[Timi]

Didn't expect to dive into systems architecture like this when I opened YouTube for dinner, but thanks! The sysadmin stuff is what I do myself, this is a topic I'm not familiar with (other than hearing about it) so this video was really interesting and so well explained/delivered I feel like I actually understood!