RISCV - A new hope?

Author: spellbinder, Date: 2018-08-24 22:49:00

In the past years I've realized that however hard you try to protect your privacy - Intel and AMD are fucking you over BIG TIME.
They include proprietary and totally secret software inside their processors that contains backdoors for the vendor and everyone the vendor decides to grant access to. Which basically means that you cannot trust any x86 CPU made in the past 20 years. (The same shit applies to firmware for devices.)
Some people argue that ARM processors would be an alternative to x86, but ARM itself is proprietary.
Recently I stumbled across the RISCV project that creates a new architecture that is completely free.
It seems like the development status of that project is "rock solid" and there even exists a physical development board (which currently costs a lot of money - but it exists!) that can be considered a preview of the capabilities.

So I went to check out the project repositories on GitHub and I successfully compiled QEMU and Linux for the new architecture. As of yet I didn't get to putting my freshly compiled RISCV Linux kernel into a "Linux From Scratch" system and run it in QEMU, but since the compiler runs finished without errors I am quite positive that it'll work - even though it probably will have bugs and crash often. But that's the nice thing about free software and free hardware: Whenever I do a git pull I have a high chance of getting fancy new stuff to try out. Once I find the time to build my RISCV LFS and run it, I'll post another blog with my experience.