Just circling back - I want to thank Neil and Josh for comments. The most expedient thing is to surface this RISC-V support within the existing ISA SIG, rather than starting a new SIG. I met with the ISA SIG in their last meeting and we discussed it at length.

I also wanted to add - there is indeed serious work on RISC-V happening within Red Hat, which will be more obvious as we go forward. There is finally some hardware available with a BMC that we can use within a lights-out data center, and there is already work ongoing in the Fedora community to host boards for that purpose, with the goal to set up RISC-V as a fully supported architecture in Fedora within the next 9-10 months. Fu We (wefu) has been doing this porting work for several years now, as has davidlt in the Fedora RISC-V SIG. 

So the work is happening, it is just slow and not obvious yet. Hardware has always been the blocking factor. That is clearly changing for the better this year. 

Jeffrey "Jefro" Osier-Mixon  |  josiermi@redhat.com
Distinguished Community Architect, Red Hat Office of the CTO 
Automotive, RISC-V, Edge & IoT Communities


On Thu, Feb 6, 2025 at 4:38 PM Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 6, 2025 at 4:31 PM Jeffrey Osier-Mixon <jefro@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> I don't think this SIG makes sense just yet, since we should be
>> focusing our work at the Fedora level first. Until the integration and
>> initial release of Fedora RISC-V occurs, I'm not sure we want to be in
>> the business of developing a port in CentOS given the lack of
>> infrastructure and contributors to support it.
>
>
> Thanks, Neal - appreciate your opinion as always. I believe RISC-V will be relevant sooner rather than later. For what it's worth, there has been a ton of work in Fedora thanks to teams both inside and outside Red Hat, and many images available for dozens of platforms - it is only a matter of time before RISC-V is an officially supported architecture, and I feel it makes sense to have a CentOS destination as well. Community is always a chicken/egg situation, but it costs very little to support a SIG and the benefits could be substantial.
>

In this case, it costs quite a lot to support this kind of SIG. Most
SIGs aren't talking about essentially maintaining a fork of a
distribution for a new platform, and the CentOS community is not set
up well to handle that. We have plenty of historical evidence to show
we *can't* do that (see the failed AltArch and CentOS for Raspberry Pi
efforts).

Not to mention, Fedora doesn't even yet have RISC-V as a supported
architecture due to lack of hardware, developer support, and
commitments from sponsors. Not even Red Hat is seriously doing work in
Fedora RISC-V officially as far as I can see. I've met some of the
RISC-V vendors who mention to me Red Hat making and maintaining a
Fedora RISC-V build, but the people they mention working on it are not
participating in Fedora at all.

There are serious misalignments right now that have to be resolved
long before we talk about a CentOS RISC-V effort of any kind.



--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
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