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Comment by alexrp | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly sure I recall Fedora folks signaling that they intend to move to RVA23 as soon as hardware becomes generally available.

It is of course possible that Debian sticks with RV64GC for the long term, but I seriously doubt it. It's just too much performance to leave on the table for a relatively new port, especially when RVA23 will (very) soon be the expected baseline for general-purpose RISC-V systems.

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As someone from the Fedora/RISC-V project, it'll depend on what our users want. We cannot support both RV64GC and RVA23 (because we don't have the build or software infra to do it) so we have to be careful when we move. Doing something like building with RV64GC generally but having targeted optimizations - perhaps two kernel variants and some libraries - might be possible, but also isn't easy.

Things are different for CentOS / RHEL where we'll be able to move to RVA23 (and beyond) much more aggressively.

First things first: thank you for your work.

That being said: does it make sense to keep a nee but low performance platform alive? As the platform is new and likely doesn’t have many users, wouldn’t it make sense to nudge (as in “gently push”) users towards a higher performance platform?

Chances are the low-performance platform will die anyway, and fedora will not be exploiting the full offering of the high performance platform.

It's about what users think in our forums: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/risc-v-sig

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