Debian is an operating system and a Free Software distribution.
The news was recently released by the debian project developers, that finally have managed to officially port the distribution for systems based on RISC-V architecture 64-bit (riscv64).
It is worth mentioning that this is excellent news, since with Debian's official support for RISC-V, it seeks to provide an open system for the RISC-V architecture and thus adds to the RISC-V compatibility list that it has been around since the releases of glibc 2.27, binutils 2.30, gcc 7, and Linux kernel 4.15.
For those who are unaware of RISC-V, you should know that it allows the creation of completely open SoCs and processors. Currently, on the basis of the RISC-V specification, several companies and communities under various free licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0) are developing several dozen variants of microprocessor cores, more than a hundred SoCs and ready-made chips.
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture!
This milestone is not the end of the journey, but the beginning of a new one: the port will need to be rebooted to the official archive, build daemons will need to be reinstalled and delivered to DSA, many bugs will need to be fixed. If all goes well, the architecture will finally be released with Trixie. Please note that this process will be lengthy and will take several months.
It is mentioned that the integration process of the new port with the official Debian archive will be done gradually. In the first stage, based on the package base available in debian-ports, they plan to compile a minimum set of around 90 source packages, transfer it to the official archive, and sign it with a separate GPG key.
In the second stage, it is planned to change the assembly infrastructure used to develop the riscv64 port to publish builds in the official archive and with which work will also begin on the final polishing of the builds and the removal of identified bugs. Barring unforeseen issues, the first officially supported version for the riscv64 port will be formed in approximately two years and will be part of the Debian 13 release.
Packages for RISC-V are available for installation from the repository debian-sid (Unstable). Approximately 96% of the total source packages in the Debian repositories are currently built for RISC-V systems.
Moreover, also debian developers released the news that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD ports (kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386) have been removed from the Debian archive (debian-ports).
However, it is mentioned that GNU/kFreeBSD packages can still be downloaded from the server and that the only actively developed Debian platform based on a non-Linux kernel is Debian GNU/Hurd, which continues to generate unofficial builds.
For those unfamiliar with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, you should know that this is one of the few distributions that at the time built versions that did not use the Linux kernel and instead combined the FreeBSD kernel with a glibc-based user environment and GNU utilities.
Over the years, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has gone through several phases. After many years of development, it was released as a technology breakthrough with the release of Squeeze, and finally became an official architecture with the release of Wheezy. However, it stopped being an official architecture a couple of years later with the release of Jessie, although a jessie-kfreebsd suite was available in the official archive. Some years later, it was moved to the debian-ports archive, where it slowly backed down over the years.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, was among the officially supported ports in Debian 6 and Debian 7, but was deprecated in Debian 8 and has been in a semi-abandoned state ever since.
For example, the last buildd download for kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386 was over a year ago. Last year, the ports for kfreebsd-i386 failed to load once, and for kfreebsd-amd64 only 11 times. The total number of actual packages for GNU/kFreeBSD has been reduced to 30%.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link