BeagleV Ahead: a RISC-V assembly studying workhorse. "The Art of RISC-V Assembly

[lucho]

As I mentioned, it's possible for the interested forum members to get SSH access to my machines with the first 7 ISAs my site mentions – AMD64, ARM64, PPC64, SPARC64, RISCV64 and LoongArch64. Undoubtedly, the fastest growing support is for RISC-V as many companies have jumped to the bandwagon. So, knowing RISC-V assembly language becomes almost as important as knowing those of x86 and ARM. But there aren't too many Linux-capable RISC-V machines yet. One of the few is the BeagleV-Ahead, and because it's really ahead of its time, it's not easy to bring it up to a usable by a programmer degree. But after some struggle, I managed to do so and it has Ubuntu 24.04.1 with GCC 13.2, GAS 2.42 and GDB 13.1 running for some months.

Randall Hyde (the author of the excellent "Art of Assembly" book series) considers writing a RISC-V assembly language book but he also has trouble with this board:

BeagleV-Ahead: Not ready for prime time

Do you think it'd be a good idea if I try to reach him and offer him SSH access to my board? When his future book "The Art of RISC-V Assembly" (the next one after his latest one, "The Art of ARM Assembly") is out, any member of this forum willing to learn RISC-V assembly from that book could get SSH access to it too...

[FORTRANS]

Hi,

Do you think it'd be a good idea if I try to reach him and offer him SSH access to my board?

   Actually, that sounds like a good idea.  Please keep this forum up
to date on his and your progress.  Just curious.

Regards,

Steve

[lucho]

OK, thanks! I'll try to get in touch with him.

Regards,
Lucho

[lucho]

He wrote that he's busy with his current books on x64 and ARM, and his future RISC-V book will be based on several SBCs, among which (I verified that) the BeagleV Ahead is still the fastest one. "The Art of ARM Assembly" is based on the ARM-based Mac running macOS and the 64-bit Raspberry Pi running Linux. So his examples can be studied also on my ARM machine, if one wishes so.

By the way, RISC-V is the ISA that has the minimum differences between its 32-bit and 64-bit versions. These differences are described in literally a few pages. This is one of its advantages.