After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture!
This milestone is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a new one: the port will need to be rebootstrapped in the official archive, build daemons will have to be reinstalled and handed over to DSA, many bugs will need to be fixed. If everything goes well, the architecture will eventually be released with Trixie. Please note that this process will be long and will span several months.
An important step in any architecture’s life cycle is becoming an officially supported Debian architecture.
This is pretty cool.
I’d like to give RISCV a shot at some point. Anyone have experience with an affordable SBC?
The review of StarFive VisionFive 2 here is kind of harsh…
https://jamesachambers.com/starfive-visionfive2-review/
It also seems expensive for what you get and the only US supplier is amazon, which I try to avoid on principal. Early adapters have to make do with what’s available. Alas even established SBCs including RPI are suffering 100%+ inflation and widespread non-availability.
As much as I’d love to say this is an everyday thing (because it is for me, that’s how I flash the firmware on our Cisco wireless APs at work when needed), James is right that it just isn’t something a beginner in the SBC tinkering world would be able to do at the drop of a hat.
With that said, and while I do feel that the StarFive is a great board for someone who is already familiar with such low level access to SBCs in general and I hope that future RISC-V boards are more beginner friendly, with the dearth of affordable Pi boards I think it’s a worthy investment even if it means having to learn a new procedure. After all, the Raspberry Pi Foundation at its core is about education and learning about electronics, and remembering back to the early days with the very first Pi board, there was a lot more hands-on and learning from scratch than there is now over a decade later.