Lately I’ve been really liking the idea of having something hosted on a RISC-V machine. RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is a competitor to ARM. The idea of having a something running on an open source operating system, running on an open standard CPU, served from my house, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
I was under the impression that most Linux distributions were unstable on RISC-V. Turns out, I’m wrong about that. From a quick search, the following have official Debian images:
and the Pine64 Star64 has a community-maintained Armbian image.
Does anyone here have a RISC-V single-board computer doing anything practical for you?
I do! Since a while I selfhost with my risc-v Unmatched board. There are prebuilt Ubuntu Server images available. Its mainly for software which you have the source code for, and are willing to build from source. I’ve made use of docker buildx for cross cmpilation a fair bit as well. Go and Rust has good support. A good start can be to check out the riscv-bringup repo from carlosedp. Its definitely early days though, you need to be pretty motivated. Debian support is scheduled for next year AFAIK.
So, what do I actually use it for? nginx + tailscale so far
I should say as well, postgres, mariadb and memcached all support riscv, you just got to build it yourself. I have found the riscv64 ubuntu docker images useful as well to use as a base - for example the riscv64/ubuntu one.
Here’s how I build my own images. More details are in the repo, feel free to re-use https://gitlab.com/olof-nord/selfhosted/-/blob/main/images/Makefile
Wow, thanks! That’s fantastic. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Docker images will have to be recreated for RISC-V, but it sounds like some of the most important parts of the stack are useable already. Nice to see that nginx works – I was leaning towards moving my blog to a RISC-V SBC, and it’s just a static HTML site.
