RISC-V Is Now An Official Debian Architecture

Debian 13 "Trixie" has been aiming for official RISC-V support and indeed it will happen: RISC-V has now been promoted to an official Debian CPU architecture.

While long available as a Debian port, as of this weekend RISC-V 64-bit is now considered an official Debian architecture.

Debian developer Aurelien Jarno notes though in the announcement that the official archive for RISC-V 64-bit is rather bare at the moment but will be building out soon:

"Before you rush to update your sources.list file, I want to warn you that the archive is currently almost empty, and that only the sid and experimental suites are available. The procedure is to rebootstrap the port within the official archive, which means we won't import the full debian-ports archive.

Therefore our next step is to build a minimal set of ~90 source packages using the debian-ports archive and then import them into the official archive. These packages will be signed with a special GPG key using [email protected] as the email address, enabling easy tracking. This process has already started, hence the few ACCEPTED mails on the mailing list. It will probably take a few days especially given that sid is constantly evolving.

Once done, we'll point the build daemons to the official archive. In the meantime you can just continue to use the debian-ports archive on your devices."

Debian Sid can be used if wanting this official RISC-V support once the package archive is built out while the Debian 13 release will be out as stable in about two year's time with this milestone having been missed for the recent Debian 12 debut.