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The SpacemiT K3 on a Custom Kernel: Sixteen Cores, and the Virtual Machines Still Get Eight

 · 21 min read

Ubuntu's mainline kernel shows eight of the SpacemiT K3's sixteen cores. A patched kernel.org 7.3 build now runs all sixteen, with twelve KVM guests still on the eight X100 cores and the eight A100 cores open to host programs that ask for them. Getting there took a firmware query, a device tree that would have renumbered my CPUs, a test that was wrong before the kernel was, and a panic in the previous kernel on its way out. The A100 cores have no hypervisor extension, so for the RISC-V rental business I have been costing, the result is one I predicted wrong in October: sixteen cores do not add a single virtual machine.
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Hardware Reviews

The SpacemiT K3 on Mainline Ubuntu: KVM Works, and the BSDs Cannot Boot

 · 19 min read

I promised a follow-up on whether official Ubuntu turns the SpacemiT K3 into the virtualization host its spec sheet advertises. It does: modprobe kvm loads on mainline 7.3.0 and a Debian RISC-V guest runs with hardware acceleration. But mainline sees only 8 of the 16 cores, the internal UFS storage does not work at all, and a single line of firmware configuration means FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD cannot boot on this board, virtualized or not.
Hardware Reviews

The SpacemiT K3: RISC-V Finally Competes, and the Vendor Kernel Gets in the Way

 · 20 min read

The SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX is the first RISC-V board on my bench that competes with ARM instead of apologising to it. It compiles Rust in 161.8 seconds, beats a Cortex-A76 on AES-GCM and SHA-256, and does 2.37 GB/s of hardware-accelerated crypto where the Pine64 Star64 manages 21.7 MB/s. It also cost $1,175.09 delivered, partitions its 16 cores into two clusters of 8 that no single process can span, and cannot run KVM at all because the vendor kernel oopses when you load the module.
Hardware Reviews

The MangoPi MQ Pro: One RISC-V Core, Two Hours, and What That Actually Proves

 · 12 min read

The MangoPi MQ Pro compiles the pinned benchmark in 7,824 seconds, two hours and ten minutes, which is 149x the fleet leader and dead last of twelve boards. But the interesting numbers are elsewhere: per core it is only 4.2x behind a SiFive U74, its 486 MB of RAM never became the bottleneck because being single-core kept peak memory to one rustc, and getting Rust onto it at all required a Debian chroot because OpenWrt is musl and rustup ships no musl-hosted compiler.
Hardware Reviews

The Pine64 Star64: RISC-V's Baseline Problem

 · 19 min read

The Pine64 Star64 runs StarFive's JH7110 - four SiFive U74 cores and an ISA string of rv64imafdc, which is RV64GC baseline and nothing more. It compiles Rust in 461 seconds, tenth of eleven on my bench, beating the Orange Pi RV2 with half the cores, matching its own JH7110 twin the Milk-V Mars to within 0.02%, and losing to a quad Cortex-A53 from 2012. On SHA-512, where nobody has hardware, it is only 5.9x behind a Cortex-A76. On AES-128-GCM it is 100x behind. That difference is the whole story - plus a hardware crypto engine sitting stranded behind missing userspace plumbing.
Hardware

Would You Pay for RISC-V? Doing the Arithmetic in Public

 · 14 min read

The worst benchmark number I ever published was an Orange Pi RV2 taking 650.60 seconds on a Rust compile that an RK3588 finishes in 52.55. I am now asking whether you would pay a monthly fee to rent RISC-V hardware from me. This is the arithmetic in public: what the SpacemiT K3 actually changed, why the one RISC-V box you can rent today implements a vector draft that was never ratified, what two nodes in a 1U at a Miami colo would really cost per month, and the strongest argument against the whole idea, which is a finding from my own build farm.

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Written by Alex Jokela Software engineer by trade, tinkerer by nature, single-board computer hoarder by choice. More about me →