The RISC-V ISA is commonly divided into two architectures, namely RV32 and RV64, covering 32-bit and 64-bit register sizes respectively. And although the RV64 standard is not yet fully RV32-compatible, the two are, except from some minor divergences, closely associated products of the same family. In fact, it took some
“just”? The amount of patching and the addition of binary blobs makes it significantly different from the upstream kernel.
Plus, you cannot get hardware manufacturers to cooperate with FOSS projects on testing and debugging their drivers. Hence Pine64’s efforts.
This is a false dichotomy.