Some colleagues of mine have been working hard on this for a really long time:
Red Hat partners with SiFive for a RISC-V developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
Tag Archives: risc-v
Benchmarking RISC-V SpaceMIT X60 and others
The RISC-V open instruction set architecture is becoming popular, but getting development boards into programmers’ hands so people can use it has been difficult and expensive so far, and the ones available have been slow. Things are changing, slowly, but this year many more are available. Which ones are any good?
I recently received 4 Milk-V Jupiter development boards, and one Banana Pi F3 through RISC-V International. All of these boards have the same (or very similar) SpaceMIT X60 SoC which is a fairly capable 8 core RISC-V processor.
model name : Spacemit(R) X60
isa : rv64imafdcv_zicbom_zicboz_zicntr_zicond_zicsr_zifencei_zihintpause_zihpm_zfh_zfhmin_zca_zcd_zba_zbb_zbc_zbs_zkt_zve32f_zve32x_zve64d_zve64f_zve64x_zvfh_zvfhmin_zvkt_sscofpmf_sstc_svinval_svnapot_svpbmtSince we’ll be using all of these boards for Fedora package building I ran some simple benchmarks of how well they perform. The benchmark is to recompile this grub2 package to RPMs:
# dnf builddep grub2-2.12-11.0.riscv64.fc41.src.rpm
$ time rpmbuild --recompile grub2-2.12-11.0.riscv64.fc41.src.rpm(I did a few builds in a row until the times settled down, so these are all “hot cache” builds on an otherwise unloaded board.)
| Milk-V Jupiter | RISC-V SpaceMIT X60 8 cores 16GB RAM | 748s |
| Banana Pi | RISC-V SpaceMIT X60 8 cores 16GB RAM | 962s |
| VisionFive 2 | JH7110 4 cores 8GB RAM | 923s |
| Raspberry Pi 4 | ARM Cortex A72 4 cores 8 GB RAM | 753s |
| AMD gaming PC | AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16 cores 64 GB RAM | 104s |
| HiFive Premier P550 with SSD (update 2024/12/10) | RISC-V ESWIN EIC7700X P550 4 cores 16 GB RAM SATA SSD | 598s |
| HiFive Premier P550 with NVMe (update 2024/12/12) | RISC-V ESWIN EIC7700X P550 4 cores 16 GB RAM NVMe in adapter in PCIe slot | 464s |
| HiFive Premier P550 virtualized NVMe, KVM guest (update 2024/12/15) | Host: RISC-V ESWIN EIC7700X P550 as in row above Guest: KVM guest | 678s |
We should be getting a SiFive P550 development board soon which is the first widely available out-of-order RISC-V core.
(Thanks Andrea Bolognani for benchmarking the VF2 and P550 with NVMe and KVM guest)
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Fedora on RISC-V | Devconf.cz talk
David Abdurachmanov and myself did a talk about Fedora on RISC-V. Check it out below.
(Note this is a link to the live stream, and it should start playing at 4h 45m 14s)
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Red Hat Research article on RISC-V extensions
Finally been published …
https://research.redhat.com/blog/article/risc-v-extensions-whats-available-and-how-to-find-it/
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Heads up! Lichee Pi 4A vs VisionFive 2 vs HiFive Unmatched vs Raspberry Pi 4B
I have a lot of RISC-V and Arm hardware. How do my latest 3 RISC-V purchases stand up against each other and the stalwart Raspberry Pi 4B? Let’s find out!
The similarities between these boards are striking. All have 4 cores and all except the HiFive board have 8GB of RAM (HiFive Unmatched has 16GB). All have some kind of flash-based storage: The Raspberry Pi and Sipeed Lichee are using external SanDisk SSDs connected by USB 3. The HiFive Unmatched and VisionFive 2 have NVMe drives (I hope all SBCs provide an NVMe slot going forward).
Since I mainly use these for compiling Fedora packages, I tested compiling qemu using identical configurations. I built it a few times to warm up and then timed the last build, on otherwise unloaded machines. Here are the results:
| Release date | Cost (see note) | qemu build (secs) | |
| HiFive Unmatched (RISC-V) | 2020 | £1000+ | 3642 |
| Vision Five 2 (RISC-V) | 2022/3 | £150 | 582 |
| Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A (RISC-V) | 2023 | £200 | 1376* |
| Raspberry Pi 4B (Arm) | 2019 | £238 | 1154 |
Note that in the cost column I have included tax, delivery, and all extras that I had to purchase (such as disks) to bring the device up to the tested configuration. This is why the prices are much higher than the sticker price you will see online. Also the Raspberry Pi price is what I paid back in the halcyon days of 2020 before Raspberry Pi shortages.
* The speed test for the Sipeed Lichee was done using the Fedora distribution. There seems to be something very wrong with the measured speed of this board, and given the TH1520 chip we think this board ought to be able to do much better. However restoring the original Debian distro to it will require a load more work, because the boot path for this board is insane.
If you would like to try to reproduce these numbers, first download this config file (benchconfig.sh). Then check out qemu sources @ commit 885fc169f09f591 (don’t forget the submodules). Then do:
mkdir build cd build ../benchconfig.sh make clean time make -j4
This should compile about 2576 targets (the number can vary depending on the precise stuff you have installed, it’s hard to make qemu configurations completely identical, but it shouldn’t be much larger or smaller than this).
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LicheePi 4A cpuinfo etc
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
hart : 0
isa : rv64imafdcvsu
mmu : sv39
cpu-freq : 1.848Ghz
cpu-icache : 64KB
cpu-dcache : 64KB
cpu-l2cache : 1MB
cpu-tlb : 1024 4-ways
cpu-cacheline : 64Bytes
cpu-vector : 0.7.1
processor : 1
hart : 1
isa : rv64imafdcvsu
mmu : sv39
cpu-freq : 1.848Ghz
cpu-icache : 64KB
cpu-dcache : 64KB
cpu-l2cache : 1MB
cpu-tlb : 1024 4-ways
cpu-cacheline : 64Bytes
cpu-vector : 0.7.1
processor : 2
hart : 2
isa : rv64imafdcvsu
mmu : sv39
cpu-freq : 1.848Ghz
cpu-icache : 64KB
cpu-dcache : 64KB
cpu-l2cache : 1MB
cpu-tlb : 1024 4-ways
cpu-cacheline : 64Bytes
cpu-vector : 0.7.1
processor : 3
hart : 3
isa : rv64imafdcvsu
mmu : sv39
cpu-freq : 1.848Ghz
cpu-icache : 64KB
cpu-dcache : 64KB
cpu-l2cache : 1MB
cpu-tlb : 1024 4-ways
cpu-cacheline : 64Bytes
cpu-vector : 0.7.1
# free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 7803 432 6816 11 645 7371
Swap: 0 0 0
# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
mmcblk0 179:0 0 7.3G 0 disk
|-mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 2M 0 part
|-mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 500M 0 part /boot
`-mmcblk0p3 179:3 0 6.8G 0 part /
mmcblk0boot0 179:8 0 4M 1 disk
mmcblk0boot1 179:16 0 4M 1 disk
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Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A
At some point I will do a head to head comparison of HiFive Unmatched, Vision Five 2, Lichee Pi 4A, and Raspberry Pi 4B. I believe this little Lichee board below might win!
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Richard WM Jones 