I am starting to realize the riscv ecosystem is going to be just as fragmented as the aarch64 ecosystem. We won’t have one image of linux that we can simply boot and run on any riscv64 board and will run and take advantage of all the chip/gpu/crypto hardware.
This is exactly what starfive is not trying to do. The main reason the aarch64 ecosystem is so fragmented, is because every board vendor tries to “provide support for their board” by maintaining their fork of a distro of their choice without actually upstreaming anything. If they were to properly upstream support, they wouldn’t need to maintain their fork anymore.
especially with a live OS installer image to test it on any SBC without it being installed yet
A lot of x86 being able to do that is down to their fleshed out UEFI support, which allows the board to do alot more without an operating system or bootloader. This in turn allows bootloaders like grub that work on a much higher level than bootloaders like U-boot. RISC-V and ARM don’t really have something like that right now, as they both came from the embedded world, where you try to avoid bloated ROMs as much as possible. Luckily, EDK2 support for RISC-V exists, which makes UEFI on RISC-V possible. Now it’s up to board vendors to actually implement it, which is being done (SOPHGO, for example, is trying really hard), so again, it should be a question of time.