State of the Arch: Fedora on RISC-V

Efforts to port Fedora Linux to RISC-V began in 2016, long before physical hardware was accessible to developers. Today, the vast majority of Fedora packages have already been ported to riscv64 (i.e. the RV64GC baseline) and OS images—both generic and board-specific—are available for recent releases.

RISC-V is currently an alternative architecture in Fedora, so these (non-official) images are built by a dedicated team of community contributors, the Fedora RISC-V team. However, the end goal is to make RISC-V a primary architecture on Fedora.

So, what changed since the last update at DevConf 2024? What does the path for RISC-V to become a primary architecture on Fedora look like? What are we currently working on and what are our future plans?

Beyond software, we'll also survey the current hardware reality. Today several development boards are available. If one is getting started with RISC-V today, what board to pick? We'll review the available hardware, from the "VisionFive 2" to other capable boards, and outline our experience building Fedora on it.

Finally, whether you have a board on your desk or just a desire to contribute, there are many ways to help push Fedora’s RISC-V journey across the finish line. Join us to learn more!