With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian “Trixie” release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.
A Debian RISC-V BoF session was held at this week’s DebConf25 conference in France to discuss the state of RISCV64 for Debian Linux. The talk was led by Debian developers Aurelien Jarno and Bo YU.
Debian’s RISC-V ambitions date back nearly a decade when the first RISCV64 port was started for Debian and then after all the work over the years, Debian 13.0 in August will finally debut it as an official architecture. RV64GC is the current target for Debian RISC-V and using UEFI-based booting as the default. Over seventeen thousand source Debian packages are building for RISC-V with Trixie.
The supported hardware/targets with Debian 13.0 on RISC-V include the SiFive HiFive Unleashed, SiFive HiFive Unmatched, Microchip Polarfire, and the VisionFive 2 and other JH7110 SoC platforms. Plus QEMU can work with Debian RISC-V as an emulated/VM target. Other RISC-V single board computers may work fine with Debian 13.0 if resorting to using their vendor kernels. Support for additional boards in the future may come to Debian 13 via Trixie-Backports.
One of the issues for Debian RISC-V efforts is that their build daemons are still based on the aging SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer boards and they are “quite slow”. Faster RISC-V systems are not currently working with the Debian kernel and/or lack enough RAM to serve as build daemons for crafting the Debian RV64 packages.
Those wishing to learn more about this current state of Debian for RISC-V can see the PDF slide deck from DebConf25.
