RISC-V Made Nice Software Progress In 2024 While Interesting Hardware Still Rare

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phoronix.com, Jan. 01, 2025 – 

RISC-V on the software front made very nice progress over the past year with a lot of Linux kernel and toolchain improvements, new targets being enabled, and new instructions being supported along with other additions for improving the overall RISC-V software ecosystem. When it comes to hardware though most of the readily available RISC-V systems are painstakingly slow and the more performant/featureful options are much harder to come by.

Below is a look at the most popular RISC-V news for 2024 on Phoronix for looking back at the progress made over the year. It sadly hasn't been too interesting on the hardware side for performance benchmarking with widely available options like the VisionFive 2 being much slower than Raspberry Pi boards. The delayed SiFive HiFive Premier P550 is now reportedly shipping albeit the company hasn't been helpful in any review samples like with their past hardware launches for help showcasing the potential there for that RISC-V board. Over on the Milk-V side with some higher core count options there has also been repeated delays in seeing actual hardware. And then the other options available also tend to be on the slower side with no real selling points besides for those specifically seeking on bare metal RISC-V hardware. Hopefully this improves in 2025.

-Rust-Based Redox OS Gets RISC-V Working, Also Now Booting On The Raspberry Pi 4

The Redox OS open-source Rust-based operating system project is out with their newest monthly development update.

-GhostWrite Vulnerability Affects RISC-V CPU, Mitigating Takes A ~77% Performance Hit

Security researchers with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have disclosed GhostWrite, a new CPU vulnerability affecting a common RISC-V processor.

-Ubuntu Talks Up A RISC-V Octa-Core Laptop

Ubuntu maker Canonical put out a news release today around the DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II that is an octa-core RISC-V laptop shipping soon with Ubuntu Linux.

-Linux Preparing Support For The RISC-V Framework Laptop 13

Back in June it was teased that Framework Computer in collaboration with DeepComputing would be releasing a RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13. That RISC-V laptop motherboard has yet to be officially released but Linux kernel patches were posted today for enabling the DeviceTree support so Linux can boot on this upcoming board...

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