Developers of the Debian have announced the status update of the official port Editions distribution for systems based on the 64-bit RISC-V architecture. Currently, RISC-V packages are available for installation from the debian sid (Unstable) repository, providing assembly for about 96% of the total number of source packages in the Debian repository.
The incorporation of the RISC-V port into the official Debian archive will be a gradual process. In the initial stage, a minimum set of approximately 90 source packages will be compiled based on the available package base in Debian-Ports. This set will then be transferred to the official archive and signed with a separate GPG key. In the second stage, the assembly infrastructure used for the development of the RISCV64 port will be transitioned to publish assemblies in the official archive. Following this, efforts will focus on refining packages and addressing any identified errors. If any unforeseen problems arise, the first release with official support for the RISCV64 port is estimated to take up to two years and will be included in the release of Debian 13.
RISC-V offers an open and flexible system of machine instructions, enabling the creation of microprocessors for diverse applications without any licensing or usage restrictions. It allows for the development of completely open SOC (System on a Chip) and processors. Several dozen versions of microprocessors, over a hundred SOCs, and already produced chips are being developed by different companies and communities under various free licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0) based on the RISC-V specification. RISC-V support is currently available from GLIBC 2.27, Binutils 2.30, GCC 7, and Linux 4.15.