Hopes to help the development of 64-bit RISC-V hardware
The announcement comes from developer Manuel Fernandez Montecelo, who said that after a few weeks of hard work, he and his team managed to do an official 64-bit RISC-V bootstrap, which is now available in Debian Project’s debian-ports infrastructure for those who want to download packages on their RISC-V devices.
“We’ve been working in the last few weeks to do a (second) bootstrap of Debian for RISC-V, and after a few weeks of hard work it is now bootstrapped and has been imported into the Debian infrastructure, in particular, debian-ports,” said Manuel Fernandez Montecelo in the announcement .
According to Montecelo, there are currently more than 4,000 Debian packages successfully built for the RISC-V 64-bit (riscv64) architecture in the debian-ports infrastructure, which is the equivalent to approximately 30 percent of the packages from the Debian Sid (Unstable) software repositories.
However, the aim is to build all the Debian packages that are uploaded to the archives by their maintainers. At the moment, the team behind the riscv64 Debian port is building each one these packages for the RISC-V 64-bit architecture almost immediately after they are uploaded.
Those who want to run Debian GNU/Linux on their 64-bit RISC-V devices can now download rv64gc Debian packages (.deb) that are successfully compiled and optimized for the riscv64 architecture from here. Usually, you can find newly uploaded Debian packages for riscv64 only a few hours after they were uploaded to the archive.
You can find more details in the announcement, where Manuel Montecel said that his team hopes that their work will help to continue the development of 64-bit RISC-V hardware. Debian GNU/Linux is currently officially supported on amd64, i386, arm64, armhf, armel, mips, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el, and s390x architectures.
