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One man, two kernels, and a lot of RISC-V

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Why This Matters

Yuri Zaporozhets's innovative projects, including a RISC-V-based personal computer and a new OS called QSOE, highlight the growing versatility and potential of RISC-V architecture in the tech industry. These developments demonstrate how open-source hardware and software can empower enthusiasts and professionals to create customizable, high-performance computing solutions. This progress signals a shift towards more open, adaptable, and cost-effective computing options for consumers and developers alike.

Key Takeaways

Yuri Zaporozhets of QRV Systems is a busy chap. He's built a new RISC-V-based personal computer, a mainframe on an FPGA, and rewritten QNX – twice.

Seemingly every month or two, The Reg FOSS desk gets an email telling us about some astonishing project that he has just got working. We're delighted to see that his most recent one, a new OS called QSOE, is winning some attention in the FOSS world at present.

But first, we thought we could tell a more complete story of how he got here by describing some of his previous projects.

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(By way of a disclaimer, we feel that we should say up front that he does use Anthropic's Claude LLM to help. To his credit, he does clearly state this.)

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GateMate Personal Computer

At the end of 2025, Zaporozhets wrote to tell us about his GateMate Personal Computer. The GateMate PC is something similar to a fairly high-end late-1980s IBM PC-compatible, but instead of a 286 or 386 CPU, it has a 25 MHz RISC-V core.

He told us the main inspiration for the GateMate PC: "The very first computer I saw in my life: an IBM PS/2 Model 30, in 1992. It also started in text mode." We worked on a few of those, and they were not great machines. The GateMate machine should easily outperform the later, faster Model 30-286. He also acknowledges another project: "the NeoRV32 softCPU by Stefan Nolting is great."

It has a VGA port that can output 80x30-character text in what back then we used to call Hi-Color, 8 KB of ROM containing a BIOS, and – although it's still in the early stages – its own OS, which he calls GMDOS. The characters are double-byte ones using UCS-2 Unicode.

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