RISC-V Architecture Gets an Official Debian Support

Rohan Timalsina

August 11, 2023 - TuxCare expert team

The Debian operating system has recently expanded the remarkable list of supported architectures by adding the RISC-V architecture as an official Debian architecture. Reduced Instruction Set Computer, also known as RISC-V, is a microprocessor architecture that optimizes performance by limiting the number of cycles per instruction within its CPU programs.

Earlier, for running Debian on the RISC-V architecture, users had to utilize a Debian port for 64-bit little-endian RISC-V hardware running the Linux kernel. But now it’s time to say goodbye to the days of unofficial workarounds because RISC-V architecture is here with official Debian support.

Other architectures supported by Debian are 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).

Also, it is important to note that it is currently available for the Debian Sid (unstable) and Debina Experimental suites. However, we expect the RISC-V architecture to join the list of officially supported architectures with the release of Debian 13, codenamed “Trixie,” scheduled in June 2025.

As mentioned in this announcement post, the Debian Project is working on building a minimal set of ~90 source packages with the Debian-ports archive and then importing them into the official archive. All packages will be signed with a special GPG key using “[email protected]” as the email address for easy tracking.

The sources for this article include a story from 9to5Linux.

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