Not dropping RISC-V support after all, maybe
42 comments
·March 21, 2025DeathArrow
claudex
>It's not like we can go to Hetzner and rent a RISC-V server or go to AWS and provision a RISC-V VM.
You can go to Scaleway and provision an RISC-V instance
rollcat
I complained about hardware perf and viability in another thread.
However, there are enough options for enthusiasts / early adopters, including budget HW. I don't think e.g. PINETAB-V[1] is a desirable/useful general purpose tablet, but it's there if you want to bite. If you're going after an SBC, STAR64[2] also looks OK.
[1]: https://pine64.com/product/pinetab-v-10-1-8gb-128gb-risc-v-b...
[2]: https://pine64.com/product/star64-model-a-8gb-single-board-c...
Just adjust your expectations. x86-64 is the architecture of yesterday, ARM64 is for today, RISC-V looks like the future.
mrbluecoat
Before you get too excited..
> nowhere near my original idea of being similar to Cortex-A72; the cores are more comparable to Cortex-A55 in practical performance
Once RISC-V has a performance/price ratio of an RK3588 or N100 we can start talking about the future
brucehoult
If it hadn't been for US sanctions preventing the SG2380 being sent to TSMC for manufacturing, we would have at least one RISC-V machine (Milk-V Oasis) competitive with RK3588 (but 16 A78-equivalent cores) right around now.
Also A55 and A72 are quite comparable in practical performance -- on real-world things such as building software, not just micro-benchmarks that only use L1 cache. The Arm SBC market has generally moved away from A74 boards to A55 board with more cores, as they are more energy efficient and cheaper to make too.
ndsipa_pomu
Saw this thread and thought back to that thread as I hadn't heard of Chimera Linux before you mentioned them.
Glad to see that they're not dropping RISC-V support for the moment - not that I'm a RISC-V user yet, but I agree that it's the future.
Svip
Whilst not exactly easy to come across quite yet, there are some signs of growing public availability for RISC-V:
https://frame.work/fr/en/products/deep-computing-risc-v-main...
https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-riscv-laptop...
Hazematman
In the original post about dropping RISC-V support chimera Linux mentions that this existing hardware is too slow realistically use for build machines. They specifically mention the JH7110 which powers the framework board and the spacemit k1/m1 that powers the DC Roma laptop.
So yeah there is hardware available but expect raspberry pi 3 or lower levels of performance.
Levitating
Milk-V Pioneer has been the go to build machine for RISC-V (which was used here) which is much faster than a Raspberry Pi 3 for obvious reasons.
Felix Yan uses the same machine for building Archlinux on RISC-V.
throawayonthe
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zik
> The public doesn't have access to RISC-V hardware and it won't have access anytime soon.
There's plenty of RISC-V hardware around, and anyone can buy it. eg. [1]
IshKebab
He mean "desktop grade" hardware. Something that you might compile an entire distro on.
Those are all SBCs, and slow ones at that. Nobody is compiling an entire Linux distro on something like a Raspberry Pi 3.
kibwen
> Nobody is compiling an entire Linux distro on something like a Raspberry Pi 3.
The RISC-V mainboard for the Framework is 4-core 1.5 GHz with 8 GB of RAM. That's leagues better than the hardware that people were compiling Linux on in the 90s and early 2000s.
usrnm
You don't need to compile on the same hardware, cross-compilation is a viable option
dlcarrier
They're targeting them, though. I used to use the Rasberry Pi Zero line for embedding into projects, even though it is much, much more difficult to get than the Pi Pico, because the Zero series can run Linux, opening up a lot more software.
I've switched to SBCs based on the Bouffalo Lab BL808 and more recently Sophgo SG2000 SoCs, which are in the same form factor and price range as the Pi Pico, but run full Linux. They're nowhere near as fast or capable as a desktop, laptop, or even phone/tablet processor, but they're much faster than the RP2040 and much easier to port to. I even compile target applications on them, although not the Linux kernel itself.
geor9e
In the early development phase, you'd compile the OS on a big non-RISCV desktop PC and target those little SBC boards, then flash it onto them and boot and test. In the prototype phase, you get the real hardware, but will probably still compile from something else. By the time the real hardware is ready to be released to the public, the OS for it will probably already be finished and ship with it.
MSFT_Edging
RISC-V is commonly used in FPGA softcores when avoiding the more expensive tooling. You can find ~$100 FPGA dev boards capable of running a RISC-V Linux softcore on them right now.
While not traditional hardware, its very much available.
Levitating
> The public doesn't have access to RISC-V hardware and it won't have access anytime soon.
I do! I have a Milk-V Meles and I had a Milk-V Oasis on pre-order before it's cancellation. Been considering buying the Milk-V Megrez.
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pengaru
[flagged]
joeeverjk
So much for the “RISC-V isn’t ready” crowd—this is exactly how niche architectures survive: stubborn devs, a loaned Milk-V box, and a middle finger to pragmatism. Honestly, dropping it now would’ve been a waste. If anything, this feels like a test run for how the indie Linux world will carry RISC-V until the big players stop waffling.
lonjil
> stubborn devs, a loaned Milk-V box, and a middle finger to pragmatism.
That's not what's happening here though? With skepticism, they're willing to give it another try because someone loaned them the needed hardware. They're being pragmatic, and they're not stubborn about supporting RISC-V, as they indicate that if there are more problems they'll drop it again.
szundi
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vednig
Similar situations have happened in various open-source projects, Ampere used to provide ARM instance access to builders, before being acquired by Softbank, now the world need more such Ampere's than ever.
biugbkifcjk
OK, this one confused me. There is Chimera Linux, and also ChimeraOS - I believe they're unrelated but I had never heard of Chinera Linux and ChimeraOS is a gaming focusses distro.
Odd that there are two with Chimera in the name:
sapphyrus
> The system also has no relation to ChimeraOS, besides the unfortunate name similarity. ChimeraOS used to be called GamerOS and renamed itself to ChimeraOS later; however, at this point Chimera Linux was already in public development with its name in place.
ThePowerOfFuet
" (maybe)"
null
oguz-ismail
Good news for their huge userbase (3 people around the globe)
jbaber
I am very tempted to install solely so I could say "Ah, ah, ah: it's not GNU/Linux, it's Linux." The distro is a Linux kernel with BSD userland.
tombl
I'm slightly hesitant to mention it for fear of a flamewar, but as someone with a niche usecase that procludes me from using systemd/glibc, I'm very grateful to Chimera as a modern take on non-GNU/Linux.
yjftsjthsd-h
There's also Alpine Linux, using openrc, musl, and busybox.
They wanted to drop support because they didn't have the hardware. Now that they have access to the hardware and not dropping support, I am not sure if it matters much.
The public doesn't have access to RISC-V hardware and it won't have access anytime soon.
The problem to be solved seems availability of the hardware, not support from a small Linux distribution. It's not like we can go to Hetzner and rent a RISC-V server or go to AWS and provision a RISC-V VM.
And the availability will only improve if there is enough demand from the market to build such hardware. The EU and China wanting to be less dependant on US tech might help here.
Of course, RISC-V hardware should be on par on perf/price with x86 and ARM to tempt someone to switch.