An Open Source Release of the Freedom U540-C000's Bootloader (sifive.com)

Title deserves mention of RISC-V board.

Notice that this is really a cool development about something that SiFive was criticized for.

It was picked up for example here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RISC-V-N...

> All this said, note that the HiFive is no more open, today, than your average ARM SOC; and it is much less open than, e.g., Power. I realize there was a lot of hope in the early days that RISC-V implied "openness" but as we can see that is not so. There's blobs in HiFive.

> Open instruction sets do not necessarily result in open implementations. An open implementation of RISC-V will require a commitment on the part of a company to opening it up at all levels, not just the instruction set.

> by Ron Minnich (Google, Coreboot)

Its fantastic to see that they are really pushing in that direct. Specially that they try to go as deep as possible form there.

Establish a new standard people strive for, open hardware and firmware.

There are many blobs left but having a platform that starts out pretty open will allow lots more development on the missing pieces.

Edit: I think Ron is now happy https://github.com/sifive/freedom-u540-c000-bootloader/pull/...

> the first person to submit a pull request that can exactly reproduce that ROM will get a HiFive Unleashed board!

That's a fun challenge and a nice reward.

It's good that they were able to work this out with their memory controller vendor, a lot of people will not appreciate the fact that that is an effort unto itself.