People who know me know that I don't really care about non-ARM architectures. I have been involved with it for a long time, and I'm yet to be excited by what has been coming from the other side of the fence (on the other hand, if you know of a new CPU architecture that doesn't repeat all the combined  mistakes of x86+ARM+Power, please let me know).

That was one of the reasons to pick the RPi Pico as the uC for the Central Scrutinizer: an architecture I was comfortable enough with and can debug easily.

The same people also know that my OS of choice is Linux. I have been doing kernel stuff for a few decades, and this is the only OS I have used since 1993. Yeah, it's been that long.

Of course, picking the Pico meant that running Linux (*real* Linux, not uC/Linux) was out of the question. And for something that is essentially a set of state machines, it really doesn't matter much.

But then I saw this. The form factor is of course a direct nod to the Pico, but the characteristics are on a different scale: a 64bit CPU that is capable of running Linux, plenty of peripherals (including Ethernet), and a price that is close enough to that of the Pico that I start thinking of new possibilities... What if, instead of plugging the CS board into a console server, the CS was becoming *the* console server? And make use of the MIPI interface to do HDMI capture? Does anyone else think "full BMC"?

Of course, people paying attention will say "but this is a RISC-V CPU, what's wrong with you?". And they'd be right to ask. But maybe that's the sort of incentive I need to start looking at other architectures... ;-). And if you know of an interesting arm64 board with the same form factor, please shout!

Now, this thing is as far as you can imagine from being usable. There is a v5.10 BSP for it, which I am not going to touch with a barge pole (it mandates fetching unknown x86 binaries and running them locally, which isn't going to work anyway on my arm64 box). So I've started looking at the upstream support for it, and as of v6.7-rc1 we have interrupts, timer and UART working. Nothing else. Not going to ship anything with it any time soon.

But I definitely like the idea of it, and I plan to spend some time improving the upstream support. Maybe in a year or so, I'll be able to get to the point where the firmware for the CS is only a userspace process, and nothing else. That'd be cool... and would open the door to more interesting experiments!

Stay tuned!