Banana Pi BPI-RV2 RISC-V gateway board

How "trustworthy" is the "dedicated network processing accelerator (NPU) (supports L2/L3 hardware processing, IPv4/IPv6 dual stack, 20Gbps switching capacity, full byte wire-speed forwarding)"? Is it fully "hardware", auditable, or does/could it run some blob firmware with unknown/undocumented "features"?

FYI, the previous (probably more expensive) Banana Pi BPI-F3 is faster and has more cores. This one has 4 C908 cores @1.25GHz with VLEN=128 and the BPI-F3 has 8 X60 cores @1.6GHz with VLEN=256.<p>Both are simple in-order cores and they are likely even based on the same predicessor implementation.<p>Edit: Actually, I don&#x27;t know the VLEN, but previous boards with C908 had 128-bit vectors. The IP is configurable, so it could also have a larger VLEN, or no vector support at all.<p>Edit2: It might be no vector support at all, since the device tree doesn&#x27;t list support for the &quot;V&quot; extension: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BPI-SINOVOIP&#x2F;BPI-RV2-SF21H8898-OPENWRT-BSP&#x2F;blob&#x2F;bf933540397c472f800f21d0549524bae28135ae&#x2F;sf_kernel&#x2F;linux-5.10&#x2F;arch&#x2F;riscv&#x2F;boot&#x2F;dts&#x2F;siflower&#x2F;sf21h8898-fullmask.dtsi#L34">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BPI-SINOVOIP&#x2F;BPI-RV2-SF21H8898-OPENWRT-BS...</a>

RISC-V new hardware is alway good news. Waiting for this ultra-performance RISC-V 64bits implementation using state of the art silicon process.<p>But here, has the USB controller a device mode?

It looks good on paper, but more importantly if it couldn’t run on mainline Linux kernel I won’t buy it

More user friendly details here with the estimated price of only USD$35! [1].<p>[1] Banana Pi BPI-RV2 Gateway Board Integrates Siflower SF21H8898 RISC-V SoC<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxgizmos.com&#x2F;banana-pi-bpi-rv2-gateway-board-integrates-siflower-sf21h8898-risc-v-soc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxgizmos.com&#x2F;banana-pi-bpi-rv2-gateway-board-inte...</a>

nvme ssd slot...<p>Hear that, you arm vendors? You can have a low power board without being stuck with crap microsd storage...

Why not have 5 x 2.5GBe ports rather than 5 5 x 1GBe ports?

Can definitely see riscv taking this segment of the market over completely in record time. Consumer routers, pro-sumer managed switches, wifi APs etc.

Would be great to have an option with more LAN Ports.

The specs look like my multimedia Athlon XP PC from 2002, talk about embedded not being powerful enough.

512 MB of RAM is low, even for a board intended as a router&#x2F;gateway.