Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scope of Rocky Linux RISC‑V Support

  • Announcement seen as expected after RHEL 10’s RISC‑V preview; Debian 13 also gaining official riscv64 support.
  • Some argue the title is misleading: initial support is limited to VisionFive 2, SiFive P550 boards, and QEMU.
  • Others note that once the cross‑build and CI infra exists, adding more boards becomes comparatively easy; AltArch SIG is expected to ship custom kernels/firmware for additional SBCs, similar to ARM boards.

Rocky vs Red Hat and Contribution Debate

  • Critics say Rocky’s model is “lazy rebranding” of RHEL work and accuse project leadership of past bad behavior and poor attribution (e.g., thanking Fedora but not Red Hat).
  • Rocky contributors reply they’ve cooperated with Fedora/Red Hat on RISC‑V for over a year and emphasize community work via AltArch.
  • Questions arise about how Rocky gets sources after Red Hat’s access changes; responses point to CentOS Stream 10 and RHEL customer sources, with RISC‑V patches to be published.

RISC‑V Ecosystem and Hardware Readiness

  • Several commenters are excited for a “RISC future” but feel daily‑driver‑class hardware isn’t ready yet; current advice is to use SBCs and wait for high‑performance cores.
  • FPGA‑based platforms are praised for flexibility but criticized as too slow and RAM‑limited for serious Linux workloads at consumer budgets.

Enterprise Distros, Stability, and Package Management

  • Long thread on RHEL/Rocky vs Ubuntu/Debian:
    • Some dislike “elderly” stacks and slow kernels in enterprise distros; others value battle‑tested software and 10‑year support.
    • Multiple anecdotes of Ubuntu non‑LTS systems having dead apt repos; defenders argue this is expected and vendors should ship LTS.
    • Debate over apt vs dnf: older experiences with RPM dependency hell push people toward Debian; others say modern dnf/yum solved this long ago and offer strong transactional features.

Kernel Age, kABI, and Drivers

  • Red Hat engineers explain: RHEL kernels carry heavy backports, so the version number looks old but code is close to recent mainline.
  • kABI stability exists for third‑party drivers, but HPC users report MOFED and Lustre breaking on every minor release.
  • Lustre devs say they rely on many non‑kABI symbols, making DKMS and upstream‑style tracking more practical than strict kABI.

Booting RISC‑V Boards and Standardization

  • Discussion on how non‑x86 boards boot generically:
    • Most RISC‑V and ARM Linux devices still rely on device trees; ACPI is mainly for server platforms and Windows‑on‑ARM.
    • RISC‑V server groups are working on UEFI+ACPI‑style standards, but “universal discovery” isn’t broadly there yet.
    • DT isn’t inherently tied to per‑board OS images; DT blobs can live in firmware (e.g., u‑boot) to enable more generic images.