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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[x-post @[email protected]] Do you run anything on a RISC-V processor? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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(also posted on @selfhost)

RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is an alternative to ARM. I had thought that we were still waiting for a stable Linux distribution on RISC-V devices, but it turns out many RISC-V machines can run Debian already.

Does anyone have a RISC-V device that they use regularly? How has it been working?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Definitely interested - is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?

I've been bitten before with a device that "supports" a major distribution, but only if you install our custom pre-built image (good luck auditing what we've tweaked) and only with our special pre-built kernel that isn't even an LTS version, and has a bunch of patches applied to support whatever weird peripherals we decided to throw on the board, and will get exactly 0 updates after the initial release.

Raspberry Pi gets around this by being big enough to get buy in from vendors (Ubuntu distributes a special kernel + firmware bundle), but support for all the other smaller knock offs seem shaky at best

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?

Unfortunately, sounds like "no" currently. The ones that let you install Debian usually provide some kind of custom Debian image for that specific SBC. Like you, I'm not really a fan of that. But apparently there are some desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs coming out. Hopefully that will increase the chance of things getting supported in mainline distros.