Writing an operating system kernel from scratch

How does one get their hands on low-cost RISC hardware?

There's this $10 board on Aliexpress called Milk-V Duo S. It's been popping up on my recs every now and then. Looks interesting.

https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-Milk%2525252dV-Duo-S.html

Taken directly from its description:

>Milk-V Duo S is an upgraded model of Duo with an upgraded SG2000 master with a larger 512MB RAM and extended IO capability

>Onboard WI-FI6/BT5(Model Milk-V-Duo-S-512M-Basic/Milk-V-Duo-S-512M-eMMC does not have this function)

>USB 2.0 HOST port

>100 Mbps Ethernet Portwith PoE Support (via PoE HAT)

>Dual MIPI CSI with ISP

>The device also supports switch between RISC-V and ARM boot via a switch

I think there are dozens of boards by now, but what I found interesting and pledged to is this:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2-l...

I don't have a first version visionfive2 myself, but i heard good things about it and the eco-system sounds like it's growing. There are still rough edges. Lets hope they ship soon (tm)

Edit: What I currently have for my personal projects is a PolarFire SoC Discovery Kit. That's a quad-core RISC-V system with FPGA embedded. Maybe too expensive and not for everyone (130 bucks, fun fact: The dev board is cheaper than the chip itself).

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/MPFS-DISCO-...

Also the microchip documentation, toolchain and so forth feel really crappy and old, but once you get used to it, it's not that bad and actually getting to run bare-metal risc-v code is easy. There are easy examples for linux and bare-metal

Maybe just run an emulator on your x86/apple, for now? It'll probably be faster than actual hardware, and it will for sure be faster to develop a kernel with.

https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-riscv.html

This has risc-v: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-2/