2025 is the year of Linux on RISC-V.
No, seriously. Sit back down–you can’t get off until the next stop anyways.
Fedora is jumping on the RISC-V train as a fifth architecture. While there’s still some work to be done, we’ve hit some major milestones towards a more open computing future. By embracing RISC-V, Fedora’s doubling down on its commitments to Freedom, Friends, Features, and First. Whether you’re a developer or an enthusiast, there’s only one thing this means: It’s time to start building.
Embracing Open-Source Hardware with RISC-V
RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is an open-standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) based on Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) principles. Unlike proprietary architectures, RISC-V is free and open. This allows anyone to design, manufacture, and sell RISC-V chips and software without licensing fees or restrictions. This openness removes barriers to innovation, fostering a collaborative, community-driven approach to hardware development similar to open-source software. Developers are empowered to customize processors for specific needs, sharing enhancements and optimizations that accelerate technological advancements.
RISC-V was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. It was created to provide a simple, extensible ISA for computer architecture research and education. Recognizing its broader potential, the creators made it freely available to all. Since then, RISC-V has gained significant traction and evolved into a mature, competitive architecture governed by RISC-V International. With contributions from industry giants, academic institutions, and a passionate community, RISC-V represents a significant shift in the hardware industry toward an open and inclusive technological landscape.
Fedora’s Journey with RISC-V
- Integrated Infrastructure: We’re excited to share that a dedicated RISC-V Koji instance is now live in our Fedora data center. This new hardware is fully integrated with Fedora’s authentication and core services. In time it will be accessible to all Fedora packagers for submitting builds.
- Ready-to-Boot Images: Fedora 41-based images are available, allowing you to quickly spin up a RISC-V board—or even a virtual machine—and experience Fedora on RISC-V firsthand.
Why This Matters for Developers and Users
Over the past year, there has been a surge of new RISC-V hardware hitting the market. The options for operating systems have been typically limited to Debian or a derivative thereof–or occasionally an older Fedora version/variant. In the RISC-V Special Interest Group (SIG), the focus has been on bringing together all the efforts to enable this emerging architecture for the wider Fedora community: keeping packages up to date with branched versions, building images for supported hardware, and integrating required package modifications upstream.
For Fedora users, this means there are now up-to-date Fedora images for a handful of popular RISC-V boards that SIG members have been running for many months to perform native builds. So, if you have any boards collecting dust, now is a great time to check out which hardware we’re working on and take Fedora on RISC-V for a spin.
For our Developers, there’s no need to worry. If you want to get involved, more information will be available in the coming months as the Koji infrastructure is deployed and configured. At the moment, a dist-git “overlay” is used for a number of packages in order to enable this new architecture. This is necessary as there are often upstream changes required which affect only the new architecture. While the upstreaming work is in progress, the overlay setup allows the SIG to collaborate more effectively on the changes.
Those wishing to follow along or contribute to the SIG are encouraged to join us on Matrix, and to review the RISC-V Tracker that is available to track the upstreaming progress, as well as the SIG page.
Getting Started with Fedora on RISC-V
Supported Hardware
- SiFive HiFive Premier P550: This board boots with a provided image using a vendor kernel. While it works out of the box, please note that it relies on vendor firmware, which may limit certain features.
Additional Hardware
- Banana Pi BPI-F3 and Milk-V Jupiter M1/K1: Fedora on this board is possible for those who aren’t afraid of a bit of work. Although not supported out of the box, it remains an interesting option for those willing to experiment and contribute improvements.You can check out the SpacemiT Fedora Install Guide if that sounds like you.
Installation Instructions
Get Involved
felicis
Hi, just wanted to point out that the URL of the link to Fedora Architectures (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/architecture/) shows a page not found error.
Found this page on the wiki though : https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures
Gregory Bartholomew
Thanks for reporting the problem. The link has been updated.
SD
“RISC-V was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010, RISC-V. ”
I think it was developed in the Department of Redundancy Department.
Great article though. Good update on the progress here. Think it could be pretty damn big eventually.
Richard England
Would you consider a career as an editor? 🙂 Thank you for pointing this out.
Neil Hanlon
My official comment is that one has to appease the SEO plugin.
Or it was an oops while I was fixing something else 😀
phantom
Don’t see it mentioned in this article but I have Fedora 41 running on DeepComputing/Framework’s new RISC-V mainboard. The image was provided by DC as opposed to using the standard Fedora installer, but I imagine that could be made to work as well since DC provides a supported image for their mainboard and you’d just have to duplicate whatever changes they made. Might be worth adding to the conversation, since DC provides ready-to-go RISC-V laptops and Framework’s mainboard is a drop-in replacement for their Framework 13 laptop as well.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get KDE up and running with it, which is my number one wishlist item for this. 🙂 Hopefully soon!
davidlt
Correct. I believe (correct if I am wrong) those Fedora images are provided by Fu Wei and students from Chinese Academy of Sciences, and maybe PLCT Lab.
JH7110 is an old chip, and most of it is upstreamed. Some things are still under review (e.g. display engine and HDMI IIRC). iGPU is the biggest problem here. The firmware is available on the IP vendor gitlab repository, but it’s not yet in linux-firmware. The same applies to Mesa. They have started expanding upstream support for iGPU in TH1520 (another RISC-V SoC), and thus at some point they could starting working on JH7110 support. This is a bit unknown as Imagination decides to quit RISC-V CPU business, and we don’t sure if that will have affect for their iGPU software roadmap.
Ed
RISC-V should have a great future. The near term issue is how many FOSS applications programs are available to run on it. It might be useful if there was a web page telling what is available to run on RISC-V hardware runniung Fedora? Because RISC-V architectures have been defined for many different uses, this will probably, eventually be a bigger deal than for some of the other CPU architectures (PowerPC, Apple, etc.) that Fedora runs on. As much as anything, the fact that Linux is running on RISC-V hardware should benefit RISC-V and that hardware quite a bit.
davidlt
The basic answer would be that pretty much everything runs that runs on x86_64, aarch64, etc. There are still a few bits in WIP (e.g. LuaJIT, valgrind), but ports exist and in active development. Languages like NodeJS (V8), OpenJDK, etc. already have native optimized back-ends. So basically riscv64 (as-is) is quite boring (as it should be). Also non-language specific packages (e.g. ffmpeg) also include optimizations for riscv64 ISA already.
Things like GNOME + Wayland has been working for years now. I have been running Unmatched + AMD dGPU some years ago with 4K monitor, and watching 4K movie content with HW acceleration without any problems. It’s really that boring.
Michael Miller
I built a nice HiFive Unmatched rig during the pandemic. I’d love to get this thing running Fedora 41. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with validation of the most recent images.
davidlt
We have some test images for Fedora 41 + new firmware (U-Boot v2025.01 + OpenSBI v1.6) available for Unmatched. We attempted to enable initial-setup in Fedora 41 this causes issues on some boards (P550 and Unmatched). We are most likely reverting this change in the next iteration of Fedora 41 disk images.
Neil Hanlon
We didn’t mention it because it is end of sale and not the “current” generation, but Unmatched boards make up a fair share of the RISC-V builders we have. Definitely come find us on Matrix if you’d like to help get the images in shape as the wiki page is a stub right now https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V/SiFive/HiFiveUnmatched but as I said, it can definitely run Fedora!
Andrew Moore
I’m happy to report that the VM is working flawlessly. Since there’s no graphics interface, I’d like to offer my implementation of the ed line editor that provides full scrolling – backwards, forwards, half-page, UTF-8, etc. Since it doesn’t depend on curses, one only needs to set the LINES and COLUMNS environment variables. For instance, my terminal window size is 43×132, so I initialize with:
curl -sSLO https://github.com/slewsys/ed/releases/download/v2.1.1/ed-2.1.1-1.fc41.riscv64.rpm
sudo dnf5 install -y ed-2.1.1-1.fc41.riscv64.rpm
Thank you all for your amazing efforts!
Hmm
???
Andrew Moore
Per the installation instructions for the VM image https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V/QEMU:
Just to be clear, some RISC-V hardware vendors do provide GPU firmware. But in an embedded environment, it’s common to have nothing but a dumb terminal.