In case you missed it at the 2024 Samsung Developer Conference today, our partners at Samsung Visual Display discussed the work they have been doing to port the Tizen operating system to RISC-V. Tizen is an open-source operating system (OS) that is used in many Samsung smart T.V.s and it makes sense that they would look to the fast growing, global open-standard RISC-V to develop future systems. The presentation showed the results of efforts at both companies to expand the capabilities of the already robust Tizen approach. At the event they also demonstrated a T.V. running on RISC-V and using a SiFive Performance P470 based core.
↫ John Ronco
The announcement is sparse on details, and there isn’t much more to add than this, but the reality is that of course Samsung was going to port Tizen to RISC-V. The growing architecture is bound to compete with the industry standard ARM in a variety of market segments, and it makes perfect sense to have your TV and other (what we used to call) embedded operating systems ready to go.
Samsung’s CEO rubbed his two functional braincells together and asked himself: “Why pay patent royalties to ARM when RISC-V is free and our Tizen SmartTV platform has essentially zero binary backwards compatibility requirements?”
Good for him (and Samsung).
Does Samsung still use .NET to build Tizen applications? If they are porting that to RISC-V, it is pretty interesting.
Yes, see https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/84834
Hello, not strictly related, but maybe someone knows something about this: “Tizen is an open-source operating system” I’ve tried to get the code and build it a few times in the last months, but the project appears quite dead: I’ve written to the forum (developer.tizen.org) but no reply, git servers appear very slow and it’s lagging heavily, and I couldn’t see any commits and any tickets visible in the gerrit system. Does someone know something about this, is the project really dead or just I’m looking in the wrong place? Thank you in advance and sorry for being somewhat off-topic.
Yeah Tizen is odd. I’m haven’t tried to see if they are violating the letter of the law with licensing, but there hasn’t been a runable version in some time. I think they abandoned any pretense of having a community around it. It failed as a phone OS,
Outside of samsung, is there a demand for tizen? I mean i do not mind corps doing their own thing… but it is not a selling point at this time other than that it uses efl and thus is a lot faster and more responsive than the native google whatever the toolkit is called for gui apps. Most people do not seem to care about that as seen with the iPhone 12 onwards with their slow, flat and ugly controls and interface.
I don’t see why consumers would care about it. Why would I want this over Android or iOS? If you are a company with custom ( or at least bespoke ) hardware, Tizen could be an interesting component of custom firmware. It would be a lot easier than rolling your own and has some unique attributes. It would be a risk though I guess because you never know when Samsung is going to abandon it. You would at least have to be prepared to take it on yourself.