RiscV as a daily driver

Recently Christopher Barnatt on his YouTube channel ExplainingComputers has spent a week attempting to “live off the land” in a purely RiscV environment.

In some respects it a great demo of how far things have come. A large portion what you would expect to work is in place, however some basic functionality such as the inability to use Yubikeys to authenticate via the browser (probably an issue with the libu2f-udev libraries) and the inability to run complex application with many dependancies such as Kdenlive/Blender.

Interestingly the Lichee Pi 4A had better performance than a Raspberry Pi 4 in at least one test. Very promising considering the relative maturity of the RiscV ISA vs the ARM ecosystem.

One word of warning for anyone looking to go out and grab this today is that comments on Hacker News seem to indicate that Lichee Pi may have a non-upstreamed u-boot. So perhaps will not have the logevity of other products with a completeley open source firmware stack.