The State Of Debian & Fedora On The RISC-V Architecture

RISC-V remains of a lot of interest to open-source/Linux users for being a royalty-free and completely open CPU architecture. In part due to the lack of affordable RISC-V hardware limiting developers from working more on this architecture, the state of RISC-V support by Linux distributions varies but at least has improved a lot in recent years.

At this past weekend's FOSDEM 2019 conference was a RISC-V track with several interesting talks about this open processor ISA and various software efforts around it.

David Abdurachmanov talked about the state of Fedora on RISC-V. Up to around 20% of the Fedora package collection has been able to build so far on RISC-V, they do have the initial RISC-V build infrastructure in place, and other groundwork laid but there isn't yet any support for signed RPMs, there isn't yet RISC-V images for Fedora Workstation/Server, and other work left to do, but the situation continues to improve both for RISC-V in a virtualized capacity as well as on SiFive HiFive Unleashed hardware. See these interesting PDF slides and video recording to learn about this distribution on RISC-V.

Karsten Merker presented on the Debian state for RISC-V, which it too is making progress albeit a lot of work to do in bringing up this new port. See those slides and video as well if interested in that combination.

If you are wanting to learn more about RISC-V this weekend, see the other RISC-V talks from the always excellent FOSDEM event.