Some of you have been following on IRC, some of you have noticed the ACCEPTED mails from dak on the mailing list, some of you may have noticed the recent closure of bug #1033658. For all the others, I am happy to share the good news:

riscv64 is now an official Debian architecture

If you don’t believe it, just have a look at [1]. However before you rush to update your sources.list file, I want to warn you that the archive is currently almost empty, and that only the sid and experimental suites are available. The procedure is to rebootstrap the port within the official archive, which means we won’t import the full debian-ports archive.

Therefore our next step is to build a minimal set of ~90 source packages using the debian-ports archive and then import them into the official archive. These packages will be signed with a special GPG key using debian-riscv@lists.debian.org as the email address, enabling easy tracking. This process has already started, hence the few ACCEPTED mails on the mailing list. It will probably take a few days especially given that sid is constantly evolving.

Once done, we’ll point the build daemons to the official archive. In the meantime you can just continue to use the debian-ports archive on your devices.

[1] https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/binary-riscv64/

  • eleitlEnglish
    161·
    1 year ago

    Great. Now we only need a decent SBC you can buy.

    • wiki_meEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Depends of what you mean by decent, but there are several linux capable ones that are fairly cheap.

      • eleitlEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I’d settle for a headless box with roughly rpi4 performance and decent NIC and storage I/O for less than 200 EUR. We don’t seem to be quite there yet.

        • wiki_meEnglish
          61·
          1 year ago

          Not an expert but i would start my research here , You can always ask on the risc-v subreddit where there are more knowledgeable people.

          • Janis@feddit.deEnglish
            32·
            1 year ago

            you are weird. well ofcourse i can read about it on debian. i was interested in personal experience. also, are you suggesting to visit spezland???

            • wiki_meEnglish
              21·
              1 year ago

              you are weird.

              Or maybe you are having a bit of a problem understanding people, 5 people upvoted so i guess my motives were understandable to them.

              well ofcourse i can read about it on debian.

              Some people might not know there is a list on the wiki of SBC.

              are you suggesting to visit spezland???

              I was never interested in “sticking it to the man”, even if you want to disincentivize reddit for some maybe the benefits of contributing to the RISC-V ecosystem are more important (and lets be honest, It doesn’t really “move the needle”).

              Of course if you want to buy some toy that might end up on “plastic island” that’s a different problem.

        • DaeraxaEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I’ve had my starfive visionfive 2 for a while now and Debian is (or at least was) the main supported distro.

  • ReakDuckEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I try to compile a NixOS image for my star64 board. I wonder if I can just use debian sid or smth.

  • linucsEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Awesome news! Hopefully more and more distros will catch up too.