The open source ISA RISC-V has long been making inroads into Linux distributions, but this week Enterprise Linux distros got on board en masse.
Derrick Coetzee (User:Dcoetzee), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Yesterday, when I wrote about Rocky Linux’s upcoming support for RISC-V Rock Linux 10, I missed a couple of even bigger stories that surfaced this week about RISC-V and Red Hat. It appears that earlier this week at Red Hat Summit, alongside the unveiling of RHEL 10, Red Hat announced a collaboration with RISC-V-focused SiFive that’s resulted in a RHEL 10 Developer Preview for RISC-V.
That’s some serious big-time cred for RISC-V. Especially if you couple that with the news that CentOS Stream, Red Hat’s other enterprise-focused Linux distro, is also touting RISC-V support in the form of a source code release of CentOS Stream 10 with RISC-V support.
On Tuesday, in a short post on Red Hat’s blog, the company’s Emerging Technology product manager Steve Wanless said that the CentOS version is being released within the CentOS ISA special interest group and suggests watching the CentOS blog for more information.
For the time being, support on both distros is limited to SiFive’s HiFive Premier P550 developer board, but unless I misjudge the Linux hacker community, we’re likely to quickly see both developer previews successfully installed on other hardware as well.
RISC-V and Open Source Hardware
In many ways, RISC-V is the poster child of the open source hardware movement, and brings to device makers many of the same advantages that Linux brought to the software industry back in the 1990s.
For the uninitiated, it’s an open source instruction set architecture, which basically means it’s a set of instructions that can be hardwired into a silicon chip to turn it into anything from CPUs to GPUs to microcontrollers. Initially developed at UC Berkeley between 2010-2015, a large commercial developer infrastructure has since formed around the ISA, anchored by RISC-V International, the nonprofit trade group that manages and promotes the ISA.
Tech companies like it, because its open source license means they can design chips that exactly meet their needs without having to pay expensive licensing fees. Also, being a relatively recent design, it comes to the table without the burden of technical debt, which has been a huge problem for Intel. Companies developing, marketing or using RISC-V-based silicon in their products include Alibaba, Allwinner Technology, GigaDevice, Qualcomm, and Nvidia.
SiFive, the company that Red Hat is partnering with, is a key player in RISC-V space. It was founded in 2015 by researchers Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman, all of whom were part of the initial RISC-V project at UC Berkeley.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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