riscv announcement

Author: q66

_posts/2025-03-12-dropping-riscv.md

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+**UPDATE March 20 2025:** The architecture is not being dropped
+for now after all. See the newer article for details.
+
 The next set of images will drop RISC-V support. The builder is
 currently still going but within the next few days it will stop,
 and the repositories will stay in place but frozen.

_posts/2025-03-20-new-riscv-server.md

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+---
+title: Not dropping RISC-V support after all (maybe)
+layout: post
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+---
+
+As circumstances have changed, we are not dropping RISC-V repos
+for the time being. Instead, newly rebuilt repositories are introduced,
+built on hardware, with tests.
+
+This support is provisional for now, with the new builder still being
+evaluated to see how it holds up in the long term.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## The situation now
+
+Shortly after announcing the drop, we were offered remote access to
+a Milk-V Pioneer machine by [Zach van Rijn](https://zv.io) of Adélie
+Linux. This machine was originally intended for another purpose which
+never ended up materializing.
+
+I proceeded to do a full world rebuild on this machine, after some
+environment setup to allow our infra bits to run. This world rebuild
+is now finished, and makes up the new repository.
+
+For most part, it was relatively stable during the build (we had to
+build our own kernel to prevent the draft RVV 0.7 in the CPU from
+interfering, and there were two crashes but it was also under total
+continuous load the whole time).
+
+The performance is fairly acceptable, though nowhere near my original
+idea of being similar to Cortex-A72; the cores are more comparable
+to Cortex-A55 in practical performance, especially since we have to
+disable vectors. As there is still 64 of them, most of the large
+projects build fairly fast (anything written in Rust builds very
+slowly, however).
+
+By now, the original repositories have been replaced, and the new
+machine is plugged into the infrastructure. Do keep this in mind when
+upgrading existing installations, and use the `--available` flag with
+`apk` (every package in your system will be reinstalled).
+
+Either way, we will continue to monitor the builds and see how the
+new machine holds up. If it works well, it will stay; if significant
+issues arise, we might end up dropping the architecture after all,
+at least until something significantly better is available.
+
+The current repository is in the same tier as the LoongArch64 repo.
+The specifics are very similar - i.e. no LTO, tests on and enforced.
+The overall coverage is also fairly equivalent.