Developers have recently published an ARCH Linux distribution port specifically designed for RISC-V architecture systems. Although this port is not yet official, its creator Felix Yan is one of the main developers and maintainers of Arch Linux. The primary goal of this project in the short term is to prepare patches for packages with original texts to address issues with their assembly and functionality on RISC-V systems. In the future, the plan is to integrate these patches into the main Arch Linux repositories and add RISCV64 (RISCV64GC) to the list of alternative architectures supported by Arch Linux.
This port is being developed for systems that are based on the RV64GC core and support ABI LP64D, such as HiFive Unmatched, HiFive Unleashed, StarFive V1/V2, and PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit. Additionally, the Linux-Sophgo experimental package is provided separately to enable the use of Arch Linux on the Milk-V Pioneer (SG2042) board. Those interested in experimenting with the port can also utilize it in the RISC-V emulator based on Qemu.
RISC-V offers an open and flexible system of machine instructions that allows for the creation of microprocessors for diverse applications without the need for royalties or specific usage conditions. This openness enables the development of fully open SOC and processors. Currently, multiple companies and communities are leveraging the RISC-V specification to develop various microprocessor cores, more than a hundred SOC, and already manufactured chips under different free licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache 2.0. Support for RISC-V is available starting from GLIBC 2.27, Binutils 2.30, GCC 7, and Linux 4.15.