Who should buy the HiFive Unleashed

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  1. There is a bootloader capable of booting from, amongst other things, SPI/flash and SD card.

  2. The bootloader is multiple stages, the first two are unflashable ROM in the chip itself. The first stage bootloader (FSBL) which configures DDR and PLLs lives by default on SPI/flash and can be modified. bbl+linux live by default on the SD card and are chain loader from the FSBL.

  3. Yes, there will be a Freedom/U manual.

  4. Yes, it works with riscv-linux. Currently the needed drivers are on the riscv-linux-4.15 branch. The board ships with a preprogrammed SD card.

  5. The board starts DHCP+SSH on boot.

  6. There is no compiler on the SD card; you will either need to cross-compile your own code or the gcc.

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