The Fedora Linux project is “jumping on the RISC-V train,” joining other Linux distributions in supporting the emerging CPU architecture.
RISC-V is an open-standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), intended as an alternative to the x86 architecture used in most desktop and laptops, and the ARM architecture used in most phones and tablets. The difficult legacy architecture of x86 and the complex licensing of ARM has caused some companies to more seriously consider RISC-V as the computing platform of the future. At a minimum, it might be a viable platform for embedded devices and other similar use cases; Qualcomm and Google are working together on smartwatches powered by RISC-V.
Fedora Linux has announced its plans to fully support RISC-V hardware, alongside the existing Fedora builds for Intel and AMD x86, ARM, IBM Power, and IBM Z architectures. It’s still not a “primary” architecture for the project, but Fedora is taking steps in that direction. There are now official RISC-V install images, and Fedora has spun up a dedicated server for building RISC-V packages for software repositories. Debian and some other Linux distributions also have RISC-V builds.
The announcement explains, “Over the past year, there has been a surge of new RISC-V hardware hitting the market. The options for operating systems have been typically limited to Debian or a derivative thereof–or occasionally an older Fedora version/variant. In the RISC-V Special Interest Group (SIG), the focus has been on bringing together all the efforts to enable this emerging architecture for the wider Fedora community: keeping packages up to date with branched versions, building images for supported hardware, and integrating required package modifications upstream.”
It’s still relatively early days for RISC-V, but it’s exciting to see more work being done to create fully usable operating systems on the new architecture. The hardware is also progressing: the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 supports RISC-V instructions, and Pine64 released the Star64 board and other devices with RISC-V processors. DeepComputing released a RISC-V tablet last year with support for Ubuntu, though the promised Android 15 software option still isn’t available yet.
We’re still a ways off from mainstream computers, phones, or tablets with RISC-V processors, if that ever happens, but getting a stable software platform is an important step in that journey.
Source: Fedora Magazine
