Debian GNU/Linux Is Now Officially Supported on the RISC-V Architecture

The Debian Project announced today that the RISC-V (riscv64) hardware architecture is now officially supported by the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.

Until today, Debian was officially supported on 64-bit (amd64), 32-bit (i386), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64el), IBM System z (s390x), MIPS 64-bit Little Endian (mips64el), MIPS 32-bit Little Endian (mipsel), MIPS, Armel, ARMhf, and AArch64 (arm64) hardware architectures.

If you wanted to run Debian GNU/Linux on the RISC-V architecture, an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) based on the established reduced instruction set computing (RISC) principles, you had to rely on a Debian port for 64-bit little-endian RISC-V hardware running the Linux kernel.

Not anymore, as the RISC-V (riscv64) architecture is now officially supported and you can browse the archive here or if you want to add it in your sources.list file. However, RISC-V is only available for the Debian Sid (Unstable) and Debian Experimental suites and the archive is almost empty at the moment of writing.

“Our next step is to build a minimal set of ~90 source packages using the debian-ports archive and then import them into the official archive,” said Aurelien Jarno. “These packages will be signed with a special GPG key using [email protected] as the email address, enabling easy tracking.”

If all goes according to plan, we might be able to see RISC-V as an officially supported architecture in Debian Stable starting with the next major Debian GNU/Linux release, Debian 13 “Trixie”, due out sometime in June 2025.

Image credits: Debian Project/Juliette Taka (edited by Marius Nestor)

Last updated 9 months ago