Debian 13.0 To Begin Supporting RISC-V as an Official CPU Architecture (phoronix.com) 24
It was nearly a decade ago when the first RISCV64 port was started for Debian, reports Phoronix. But one of the big features planned for Debian 13.0 (planned for 9 August) is supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture.
This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.
A Debian RISC-V BoF session was held at this week's DebConf25 conference in France to discuss the state of RISCV64 for Debian Linux. The talk was led by Debian developers Aurelien Jarno and Bo YU... RV64GC is the current target for Debian RISC-V and using UEFI-based booting as the default. Over seventeen thousand source Debian packages are building for RISC-V with Trixie... Those wishing to learn more about this current state of Debian for RISC-V can see the PDF slide deck from DebConf25.
A Debian RISC-V BoF session was held at this week's DebConf25 conference in France to discuss the state of RISCV64 for Debian Linux. The talk was led by Debian developers Aurelien Jarno and Bo YU... RV64GC is the current target for Debian RISC-V and using UEFI-based booting as the default. Over seventeen thousand source Debian packages are building for RISC-V with Trixie... Those wishing to learn more about this current state of Debian for RISC-V can see the PDF slide deck from DebConf25.
Does Anyone Know..? (Score:3)
Does anyone know where this is or would be used? So far as I know, just about the only place to find RISC-V chips is ESP-32 and Raspberry Pico 2. But surely those tiny micro controllers with very limited RAM and storage can't run Debian, can they?
It seems like a lot of effort to support an OS that will barely be used.
Re:Does Anyone Know..? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Does Anyone Know..? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
The SBCs from China are coming out at a breakneck speed, generation-wise. They are working on getting RISC-V up to par with x86 and ARM. I wouldn't be surprised to see servers with RISC-V CPUs in a year or two.
Re: Does Anyone Know..? (Score:2)
Re:Does Anyone Know..? (Score:4, Interesting)
RISCV has ambitions greater than microcontrollers. Its a royalty free architecture as apposed to ARM which requires licensing fees.
There are already RISCV ITX motherboards (the Milk-V Jupiter) and small SOC computers that can run more complex setups.
Re: (Score:2)
RISC-V is also popular for FPGA softcores.
The footprint is less than 20k gates.
On a 100M gate FPGA, that's 0.02%.
Re: Does Anyone Know..? (Score:4, Insightful)
A RISC-V computer may be the only way in decades to not have some inbuilt vulnerability like Intel's Management Engine or AMD's Platform Security Processor. That alone makes it worth considering.
Re:Does Anyone Know..? (Score:4, Informative)
Link from the summary you didn't read: https://www.phoronix.com/news/... [phoronix.com]
Text from the link you didn't read: The supported hardware/targets with Debian 13.0 on RISC-V include the SiFive HiFive Unleashed, SiFive HiFive Unmatched, Microchip Polarfire, and the VisionFive 2 and other JH7110 SoC platforms. Plus QEMU can work with Debian RISC-V as an emulated/VM target. Other RISC-V single board computers may work fine with Debian 13.0 if resorting to using their vendor kernels. Support for additional boards in the future may come to Debian 13 via Trixie-Backports.
Re: (Score:3)
I did read it. And I'd never heard of those products, which tells me that they're not widely used. Which is why I listed the much more widely used Esspreiff and Raspberry boards. But on top of the obscurity of the listed systems, the first two that I looked up, by SiFive HiFive, are both discontinued. So why expend the effort to support a discontinued board that no one uses?
The StarFive boards are still a thing and perhaps they are popular in China, but I've never heard of them prior to this article and I'
Re: (Score:3)
OTOH, being supported by a widely used OS might well help them to *become* more widely used.
Debian supports lots of systems that aren't widely used. It's even slow to drop systems that nobody appears to use. (But it does, because testing updates for those systems is difficult.)
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is RISC-V is just an architecture, like ARM. And like ARM, vendors get to put things where they want, so you end up with the same issues like ARM has where each platform is completely different - just like you can't run a single kernel that works on Qualcomm ARM SoCs and on the Samsung Exynos as they're completely different systems. Likewise each RISC-V SoC has their own thing - the SiFive kernel won't work on the Microchip processor.
ARM tries to be userspace compatible, as long as the code and
Re: (Score:3)
I did read it. And I'd never heard of those products, which tells me that they're not widely used.
You're probably not in the target market for single board computers then.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you used or even heard of any of these prior to this story?
RISC V Playlist [youtube.com] by Explaining Computers [explainingcomputers.com].
Re:Does Anyone Know..? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone know where this is or would be used? So far as I know, just about the only place to find RISC-V chips is ESP-32 and Raspberry Pico 2. But surely those tiny micro controllers with very limited RAM and storage can't run Debian, can they?
It seems like a lot of effort to support an OS that will barely be used.
From the DebConf25 slide linked in the summary:
Supported hardware
* QEMU VM (both emulation and KVM)
* HiFive Unleashed
* HiFive Unmatched
* Microchip Polarfire
* VisionFive 2 and many JH7110 based hardware
* Many more boards using just userland and vendor kernel
* Support for many more boards (SG2042, SpacemiT K1, TH1520,
etc.) progressing upstream at various speed. Will eventually end-
up in trixie-backports after the Trixie release
The full text has additional info that may be interesting.
Re: (Score:3)
RP2350s with 8MB of PSRAM can in fact run RISC-V Linux, though it would be one of those 'sans bootloader' installs with just a raw kernel in that case, and serial console over a RPi debug cable.
https://github.com/Mr-Bossman/... [github.com]
So yes, it could in theory have an RP2350-unique spin and as more upstream features happen there like SD card and/or HSTX DVI output it could happen.
Re: (Score:2)
My VisionFive 2 is offended.
It's not the fastest, or cleverest, but it works. Debian unstable on it now, Wayland is annoying, RDP is unusable until I reapply the fixes, but it is fun.
Next year I'll have to demote this to some appliance work when RVA23U64 becomes 'mandatory'. By then I think we will see many interesting RISC-V boards to work with.
Re: Does Anyone Know..? (Score:1)
It's not the... cleverest,
Computing hardware can be many things; "clever" isn't yet one of them.
Remember, kids: friends don't let friends rely on AI!"
Re: Does Anyone Know..? (Score:2)
Cleverly designed, then. Stand up straight, these can go over your head easily.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know if they're slated for support by this Debian release yet, but Pine64 is also making some RISC-V SoC boards.
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It seems like a lot of effort to support an OS that will barely be used.
This is coming from RISC-V SOC developers, and there are a number of those. They need something to boot and run that has a complete set of packages+infrastructure. It's great that Debian is the go-to distro for much of this, as opposed to a fragmented mess of proprietary dead ends.
There is a lot of new RISC-V silicon appearing or about to arrive. Tenstorrent Ascalon is one I'm looking forward to: by this time next year, Jim Keller intends to have a RV64 chip that is competitive with server grade ARM de
Raspberry Pi SBC with ARM and RISC-V cores (Score:2)
Does anyone know where this is or would be used? So far as I know, just about the only place to find RISC-V chips is ESP-32 and Raspberry Pico 2. But surely those tiny micro controllers with very limited RAM and storage can't run Debian, can they? It seems like a lot of effort to support an OS that will barely be used.
Pico 2 is exciting for two reasons. One, that it essentially added little cost to add some RISC-V cores to an existing device. Letting hardware determine what sort of code was flashed to a device and run either a pair of ARM cores or a pair of RISC-V cores on power up. Two, it's really exciting to think they could do something similar with a RPi SBC which is running embedded Linux. Linux on a Raspberry Pi is a pretty awesome Linux box for the money, and really good at its intended missions of learning softw
Re: (Score:2)
The RP2350 is in fact even more exciting/interesting:
The burned-in bootloader is only setting the initial state of each CPU core, they can in fact be individually switched between Arm and RISC-V mode, and yes you can in fact run one of each CPU cores in parallel!
So a fast way to experiment with RISC-V code is leaving a 'monitoring' process on core 0 in ARM mode that watches for new code to be uploaded over USB with small standard libraries, stop core 1, unpack the fresh code to SRAM, restart core 1 again in