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Even to support one board, they'd need the whole build / testing infrastructure for RISC-V. Likely adding more boards is booing to be easy now, and any architecture-specific regressions, easier to spot and fix timely.

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For sure, we needed a build infrastructure for RISC-V. I started out with five VisionFive 2's in my lab, and they're still doing work as needed. Granted, those are quite slow and painful because some builds will take a long, long time on those (for example, GCC took 7 days at the beginning, but we have it at about 5 days plus change now). Ever since we've added SiFive P550's to the mix, it has made it much faster for us to identify build issues and get them rectified. I still happen to use my VF2's for the "tiny" builds.

It's true that since we've had a usable build root since last 2024, it gives our AltArch group the opportunity to build different kernels to support other SBC's or boards like they already do for ARM SBC's (rasperry pi for example, since that support isn't native to the EL kernel). So while we support the VF2's and QEMU out of the box, that group will handle the additional kernels for more hardware support.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing what other boards the AltArch group will happen to add support for.

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