Debian transplant RISC-V 64 rapid progress, has now completed nearly 90% of packages transplantation.
The figure shows that the current situation ported to Debian packages on each platform architecture, which RISC-V 64 (gray line) have completed nearly 90%, while that from the beginning to the platform migration only after a few months . Debian developers blog pointed out , because half of the architecture-independent package accounts for about Debian, but just depend on the programming language interpreter software like exists, in fact, all portable version can be used with the architecture-independent software package. This means that about 90% of the outset of the package available for RISC-V 64 architecture.
But the remaining approximately 10% is how it happened? The answer is related to LLVM and Rust software, RISC-V is still a lack of support for the LLVM compiler. Rust In fact, based on LLVM, and is not based on GCC tool chain or other Rust compiler, LLVM is the only option, it boils down to LLVM transplant became obstacles .
Currently there are more than 500 Debian packages from Rust ecology (about 4%), before Rust support RISC-V 64, they are unable to build and use.
It is noteworthy that, Firefox is mainly dependent on the Rust Premium package, but the package also depends on many librsvg2 rendering SVG images, this library has been switched to Rust, while Debian currently use the C version, this is not a permanent solution.
In addition to Rust, other packages are used to some degree depend directly or LLVM, which are caused by the transplant RISC-V 64 difficult. However, the developer is expected this year will complete support for LLVM for RISC-V 64's .
Developers also introduced the optimized plan the next few months:
- 改进对 Debian RISC-V 64 可用硬件的支持，改进引导加载选项，改进 RISC-V 64 上 Debian 的命令。
- 完成 Debian RISC-V 的 wiki 页，其中包含了一个 chroot 在 HiFive Unleashedboard 中运行而不会破坏初始工厂设置的说明。
- 引导系统的完善，同时有设置 riscv64 Qemu VM 并使用 u-boot 和 opensbi 引导的说明。此外还有增加 debian-installer 支持，这是安装 Debian 系统的主要/规范方式。
- 提供 Qemu 和可用硬件的系统镜像支持。