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Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

Interesting step, their claim of world's first RISC-V servers available in the cloud is true as far as I know.

I see they list 3 officially supported GNU/Linux distros: Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine. I wonder how mature these are on RISC-V at this point and whether they're ready for production server usage.

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Nitpick: Alpine is a Linux distro, but not a GNU/Linux distro; it uses musl libc and busybox coreutils.

This is the first time I've seen the correction go the other way.

Android and ChromeOS are also Linux distributions without GNU.

ChromeOS is glibc based.

Stand corrected, although little else from GNU is exposed to userspace.

Interesting, thanks.

Or as I've recently taken to calling it, BusyBox plus Linux.

Much more ready for server usage than desktop usage.

Linux is Linux. It's hard to go wrong when you're not mucking about with graphics cards and first-person games and things like that.

For server workloads there can still be plenty of non-trivial architecture-specific dependencies besides the core OS itself, such as the JVM and other JIT-based interpreters.

Python 'pip' packages, which often have native code dependencies, may also lack official RISC-V builds.

Access to servers such as these, for pennies per hour, will accelerate authors of those packages porting them to RISC-V.

It's a lot lower barrier to entry than buying the equivalent board outright for $180.

You can also just do `docker run -it riscv64/ubuntu` on your x86 or Mac, at zero incremental cost.

You should be able to use QEMU user-level emulation to run binaries from other architectures on a RISC-V system, while using native code for the rest. Alternately if the code is available and reasonably clean, you could try a RISC-V build yourself. (Obviously not for the JVM and other JIT-dependent stuff - though these ports are ongoing too - but for most smaller projects it should work fine.)

Debian support for RISC-V is presently only in Sid (testing release). So not production ready.

When I ask people what it will take to get RISC-V into stable releases the answer is always ‘better access to test hardware’. Hopefully this is a step along the way.

Ubuntu (server) is a lot closer. For example, see the limitations at the end of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V/StarFive%20VisionFive%202

I haven't tried it -- I installed the VF2 Debian fork in April 2023 or so, then switched to SID, and I'm still on that. I think Ubuntu 24.10 will have a lot better support; mainline support for the VF2/JH7110 is almost complete for 6.6: https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan

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