A port of the Arch Linux distribution for RISC-V architecture systems has been released. While not yet official, its creator, Felix Yan, is among the core developers and maintainers of Arch Linux. The immediate goal of the project is to prepare patches for source packages that address issues with building and running on RISC-V systems. In the long term, there are plans to integrate these patches into the main Arch Linux repositories and add riscv64 (riscv64gc) to the list of alternative architectures supported by Arch Linux.
The port is being developed for systems based on the RV64GC kernel that support the lp64d ABI, such as HiFive Unmatched, HiFive Unleashed, StarFive VisionFive v1/v2, and PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit boards. An experimental package, linux-sophgo, is also available, allowing Arch Linux to run on the Milk-V Pioneer (SG2042) board. The port can be used for experimentation in a RISC-V emulator based on QEMU.
RISC-V provides an open and flexible instruction set architecture that enables the creation of microprocessors for various applications without requiring royalties or imposing usage restrictions. RISC-V allows for the development of fully open SoCs and processors. Currently, multiple variants of microprocessor cores, over a hundred SoCs, and already produced chips are being developed based on the RISC-V specification by various companies and communities under different open licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0). RISC-V support has been included since Glibc 2.27, binutils 2.30, gcc 7, and Linux kernel 4.15.
Source: opennet.ru
