The Sundarban
Jordan started writing expertise guides in 2020, but his expertise and writing expertise extends far and wide. As a baby, he learned object scripting thru the MS-DOS game engine ZZT, and he later taught himself the basics of Python programming. He’s repaired his possess smartphones, hosted house cloud servers, and revived conventional computer programs with Linux.
Outdated to getting started at How-To Geek, Jordan published articles for MakeUseOf about Linux commands, free and initiate-source software, and on-line privacy. Past expertise, he is also professionally written on agriculture industry for Ozarks Farm & Neighbor, edited proposals for non-profits, and presented at a author’s conference on superheroes and tradition.
Jordan earned a bachelor of arts in English in 2016, and he is coached faculty students on writing successfully and utilizing education expertise. He also wrote and edited product descriptions for an e-commerce store for four years.
These days you may bag Jordan web hosting film streaming simulcasts with his chums over Discord, building VR-ready gaming PCs, or reviewing the latest Wi-Fi routers. You can discover him on Mastodon.
I have been utilizing Raspberry Pi gadgets and similar single-board computer programs for years. They all have in normal their ARM processors, lawful savor most desktop computer programs are x86-64 processors, but I’m getting an SBC with a RISC-V chip.
In case you aren’t within the know, RISC-V is an Instruction Area Architecture (ISA) that’s relatively unusual to the scene. Created in 2010, it be an initiate source alternative to closed ISAs savor x86-64 and ARM. In fact, you can review the RISC-V ISA manual on GitHub yourself. Processors with RISC-V architectures don’t require licensing agreements to create, and they’re far more vitality efficient than the x86 processors dominating the PC market.
Related
It be initiate source, the way forward
Start source software and hardware I imagine offer a vision of a technological future that’s better than the world we have now. Closed source development and proprietary licenses retain back innovation whereas initiate initiatives invite all people to participate in and create on expertise.
Thanks to RISC-V’s initiate nature, more scrappy board developers can fabricate their very possess chips with out signing legal agreements or paying royalties to a make company. RISC-V is free (as in freedom), so the barrier to entry is lower—at least in phrases of manufacturing. Admittedly, make stronger for actual software is its possess challenge, as I am going to explore.
My favorite Linux distros are adding make stronger
Over the past few years, more and more Linux distributions have been getting on the RISC-V bandwagon. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, to no longer point out their Unix-savor kin FreeBSD and OpenBSD, all offer images for computer programs with RISC-V architectures (at least the 64-bit version). One of my favorite distributions I attempted in 2025, DietPi, also has a dedicated RISC-V port.
Seeing all of these announcements about added make stronger made me want to investigate the hype. A unusual variety of hardware getting waves of attention from major Linux distributions is hard to disregard.
Interestingly, Google bragged in 2023 that it was bringing Android to RISC-V. Since then, the plan has been dropped ostensibly as a consequence of how sophisticated maintaining make stronger is. I can’t abet but marvel if the user tech industry-wide push for AI-in-every part was what made maintenance too hard to point of curiosity on for Google.
I had to be careful about which board I picked
You may smooth know although that lawful because a Linux or Unix-savor distribution has make stronger for RISC-V doesn’t mean it is going to race on any RISC-V board. Hardware make stronger is a bit fragmentary, so whereas you are thinking of searching for a board, you may smooth verify the one you are deciding on will race the operating device you want to install.
I ordered the VisionFive V2 development board, which isn’t the latest and greatest, but I figured was a dependable starting point thinking about DietPi has a dedicated image for it already.
VisionFive2 RISC-V SBC Starter Equipment
Storage
SD card slot
CPU
StarFive JH7110
This single board computer equipment features the StarFive JH7110, an initiate source RISC-V U74 quad-core processor. It also has a GPU that can hit 600Mhz for graphics processing, and a couple of ports and pins for connectivity and experimenting.
Reminiscence
8GB
Operating Gadget
Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE
Ports
2 x USB 3.0; 2 x USB 2.0, 2x RJ45
Display
HDMI 2.0
If I had been going to accumulate one thing more moderen and more noteworthy, I’d stare to the HiFive Premier P550. It comes with Ubuntu LTS preinstalled, and based on experiences I’ve viewed, it blows old boards out the water, especially as a graphical desktop. It be more costly than most of the varied alternatives, but it absolutely’s what I’d accumulate if I wanted to push RISC-V to its limits.
Unusual ports and emulators are enabling software make stronger
Of course, an operating device running on a computer is one thing; actual applications you can exercise to accumulate stuff completed is another thing exclusively. Most software developers aren’t programming with RISC-V in mind, resulting within the same cycle that Home windows on ARM has faced: a lack of software make stronger means a lack of hardware adoption, which means a lack of developers creating software make stronger.
On the opposite hand, that doesn’t mean nothing will race on RISC-V. Debian Linux has manually ported around 98 percent of its package base to RISC-V. That means, so prolonged as you can bag it in Debian’s repositories, you may probably be able to race what applications you want to race on RISC-V.
What’s more, emulators are opening up more avenues for accomplishing tasks on RISC-V. The felix86 challenge is bringing x86 games to RISC-V, meaning even supposing developers aren’t themselves porting their software to RISC-V,
