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.