It's not every day that a new computer Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) begins to attract support in the industry. The last time that Red Hat implemented a new ISA was with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2 adding an implementation for the ARM design of CPUs. As of right now, RHEL supports the X86_64 (v3 with RHEL 10) ISA, ARM, IBM Power and Z. So, the announcement by Red Hat of the introduction of a developer preview of its newly released RHEL 10 Operating System on a RISC-V platform from SiFive generated a lot of interest.
If you have been following the growth of RISC-V, this may not have been a total surprise. The Fedora community has been very active with RISC-V for some time, with a RISC-V implementation of Fedora 42 becoming available 24 hours after the initial release.
However, CentOS is a slightly different situation. This is the first introduction of a new ISA since the transition of CentOS from a downstream distribution to an upstream ‘stream’, which presented a chicken and egg issue. If CentOS is intended to be the construction of the next release of RHEL, but when no current implementation exists, where do you start?
Red Hat’s approach was to focus on a single hardware platform and perform a full bootstrap of the operating system, starting from source code and going all the way up to a graphical desktop complete with a comprehensive set of developer-oriented tools. Dozens of packages required changes — ranging from the trivial to the quite substantial — to build and run successfully on riscv64, and we’re happy to report that the vast majority of these patches have landed into CentOS Stream’s dist-git already. A small handful of packages still require out-of-tree patches for one reason or another: the corresponding git trees will be made available on June 1st, 2025 together with the RHEL 10 disk image. The upstreaming process will obviously continue after that time.
That means that Fedora 42, CentOS 10 Stream and the developer preview of RHEL 10 are all available on one platform - the SiFive HiFive Premier P550. Our hope is that this offering elicits interest in using RISC-V as a platform for enterprise Linux and engages the community with an interest in RISC-V.
Links to the platform configuration and setup documentation, the RHEL 10 bootable binary image and the source code will become available on June the 1st, 2025. We will have built a landing page on developers.redhat.com that will go live on or slightly before that date. We will post a reminder and full link here at that time.
Our next steps will be to begin to build a Koji server with some of our RISC-V hardware into the CentOS build system. If you’d like to be part of this discussion, join us in the monthly ISA SIG meetings on Fridays, or on the email list at devel@lists.centos.org.