About 3 months ago I started working with RISC-V port of Fedora Linux. Many things happened during that time.
Triaging
I went through the Fedora RISC-V tracker entries, triaged most of them (at the moment 17 entries left in NEW) and tried to handle whatever possible.
Fedora packaging
My usual way of working involves fetching sources of a Fedora package ( fedpkg clone -a ) and then building it ( fedpkg mockbuild -r fedora-43-riscv64 ). After some time, I check did it built and if not then I go through build logs to find out why.
Effect? At the moment, 86 pull requests sent for Fedora packages. From heavy packages like the “llvm15” to simple ones like the “iyfct” (some simple game). At the moment most of them were merged, and most of these got built for the Fedora 43. Then we can build them as well as we follow ‘f43-updates’ tag on the Fedora koji.
Slowness
Work on packages brings the hard, sometimes controversial, topic: speed. Or rather lack of it.
You see, the RISC-V hardware at the moment is slow. Which results in terrible build times — look at details of the binutils 2.45.1-4.fc43 package:
Architecture Cores Memory Build time aarch64 12 46 GB 36 minutes i686 8 29 GB 25 minutes ppc64le 10 37 GB 46 minutes riscv64 8 16 GB 143 minutes s390x 3 45 GB 37 minutes x86_64 8 29 GB 29 minutes
... continue reading