Article Summary:
The Fedora RISC-V SIG is thrilled to share that builds for Fedora 42 have landed on time and with no delay for our RISC-V images! If you’ve been watching our progress over the past few releases, you know that staying on schedule is a big deal especially given our goals of eventually gaining “Primary” status for RISC-V as a Fedora architecture. For the past Fedora releases, builds for RISC-V have shown some lag compared to the other architectures, but with Fedora 42, we’re right on track.
Article Description: Full draft below; from OpenDev Etherpad
Full Steam Ahead with RISC-V and Fedora 42
The Fedora RISC-V SIG is thrilled to share that builds for Fedora 42 have landed on time and with no delay for our RISC-V images! If you’ve been watching our progress over the past few releases, you know that staying on schedule is a big deal especially given our goals of eventually gaining “Primary” status for RISC-V as a Fedora architecture. For the past Fedora releases, builds for RISC-V have shown some lag compared to the other architectures, but with Fedora 42, we’re right on track.
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of prebuilt Fedora 42 images for all our supported boards, QEMU, and container images. You can read more about these images in our last post and on the Hardware section of the team’s wiki. These non-official images are brought to you by the Fedora RISC-V Community.
Big Improvements, Smaller Numbers
Behind the scenes, the data tells an even more exciting story.
One way to measure and compare our efforts over time is by analyzing the number of “unresolved dependencies” in the build root. When a package is built, it typically has access to a repository containing every package built for that Fedora release–we call this the build root. Running the dnf repoclosure procedure against this buildroot by itself allows us to quantify the number of dependencies that are being fulfilled for a given build using a package built for a previous Fedora release.
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In Fedora 40, the RISC-V buildroot had over 6,900 unresolved dependencies.
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Fedora 41 slashed that nearly in half to around 3,800.
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Now with Fedora 42, we’re down to just 357 unresolved dependencies across 126 packages.
In other words, there are now only 357 subpackages from 126 packages in the RISC-V Koji which were not built directly for Fedora 42–nearly a 95% decrease in just one year.
That’s not just progress–it’s momentum.
These numbers from from our regular dnf repoclosure checks and represent the steady roll toward a complete and clean buildroot for RISC-V in Fedora. Every fix, every patch, and every accepted change brings us closer.
Upstream, Together
Our upstreaming work continues apace, and we want to acknowledge that none of this progress would be possible without the incredible collaboration from maintainers across Fedora and beyond. Thank you to everyone who reviewed, accepted, merged, and built our patches. Your support makes this architecture possible.
We’re also excited about just how many packages build cleanly without special treatment or overlay repositories that need to be cared for. RISC-V is becoming just another architecture, and that’s exactly how it should be.
Get Involved
If you’ve got RISC-V hardware (or want to try it out via QEMU), there’s never been a better time to jump aboard the RISC-V train. Install the image, test your favorite packages, file bugs, and drop by in matrix to help us keep this locomotive rolling down the tracks.
Check out our Wiki for more information, and we hope to see you on Matrix to help us shape the future of open hardware in Fedora.