RISC-V Is Sloooow
3 days ago
- #Packaging
- #Fedora-Linux
- #RISC-V
- Started working on RISC-V port of Fedora Linux 3 months ago.
- Triaged Fedora RISC-V tracker entries, with 17 left in NEW.
- Sent 86 pull requests for Fedora packages, most merged and built for Fedora 43.
- RISC-V hardware is currently slow, leading to long build times (e.g., binutils takes 143 minutes on riscv64).
- Builders have limited cores (4-8) and RAM (8-32 GB), comparable to Arm Cortex-A55.
- Upcoming hardware like UltraRISC UR-DP1000 and SpacemiT K3 may improve performance but not fully solve the issue.
- QEMU with 80 emulated cores builds 'llvm15' in 4 hours vs. 10.5 hours on a Banana Pi BPI-F3.
- Future plans include building Fedora 44 with a unified kernel image and bringing in faster builders for heavy packages.