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The latest RISC-V computer I've tested is the Milk-V Jupiter. It's pokey at Intel Core 2 Duo levels of performance—at least according to Geekbench.

But performance is only one aspect that interests me. This is the first RISC-V Mini ITX motherboard I've tested, which means it can be installed in a PC case or rackmount enclosure, and it is much more featureful than a typical credit-card-sized SBC.

It includes niceties like front panel IO, front-panel Audio, USB 3.0, and USB 2.0, 24-pin ATX power input, an M.2 M-key slot for NVMe, and an open ended PCI Express slot!

This blog post follows along roughly with today's video:

Over the past few months, I've noticed some of my automation failing on Red Hat-derivative OSes like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. The reason for this has to do with the inclusion of a curl-minimal package in some distros, which conflicts with curl if you try installing the full package.

Unfortunately, the fix for this is a little strange, and so only ends up in Ansible's dnf module, not in the more cross-compatible package module.

The error I was seeing is like:

Since boosting my Pi 5 from the default 2.4 GHz clock to 3.14 GHz on Pi Day, I've wanted to go faster. Especially since many other users have topped my Geekbench scores since then :)

In March, Raspberry Pi introduced new firmware that unlocked frequencies above 3,000 MHz for overclocking. This summer, NUMA Emulation patches boosted performance another 5-10% through memory access optimizations.

But even with a golden sample Pi 5, I haven't seen anybody go much beyond 3.1 or 3.2 GHz. The problem seemed to be power supply—the Pi's firmware limits the SoC to a maximum of 1.000V.

After seeing the Meshtastic booth at Open Sauce, my Dad and I thought it would be fun to learn more about the low power radio tech by getting our own radios and experimenting.

Then, we were contacted by Simon from Muzi Works, and he offered to send a few units of R1 and H1, his company's pre-built Meshtastic nodes.

What's a node, and what is Meshtastic? Excellent question.

What is Meshtastic?

Simply put—and copied shamelessly from the official website:

An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices

Meshtastic nodes are often tiny gumstick-size PCBs with a LoRa radio module, a couple buttons, a tiny OLED display, and a USB port.

I've been testing a Milk-V Jupiter this week, and have tested a number of other RISC-V development boards over the past two years.

As with any new CPU architecture, software support and ease of adoption are extremely important if you want to reach a wider audience. I wouldn't expect every developer and SBC hobbyist to be able to compile the Linux kernel, and the need to compile much of anything these days is getting rare. So having any instance where one has to know how to tweak a Makefile or pass in different flags to a compiler is a bit of a turn-off for platform adoption.

So one thing I've followed closely is how easy it is for me to get my own software running on RISC-V boards. It's one thing to run some vendor-provided demos. It's another entirely to take my real-world applications and infrastructure apps, and get them to work without hassle.

And to that end, Docker and Ansible, two tools I use extensively for dev/ops work, both run stably—though with plenty of caveats since RISC-V is still so new.

Update - September 26: Today my Dev Kit finally arrived! And of course, the first thing I did was tear it down—check out my teardown photos of the Snapdragon Dev Kit internals here.

Update 2 - October 17: Today Qualcomm cancelled all remaining orders, and will no longer support the Dev Kit.

I signed up to buy a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Dev Kit the second I found out about it. It's supposed to be the Mac mini killer for Windows.