We are excited to announce the release of riscv-poky, a full Linux Distribution for RISC-V. The distribution is a port of the Yocto Project, a major Linux distribution targeted at embedded systems and known for its portability and powerful build process. Yocto is a workgroup within the Linux Foundation, and is supported by a number of major industrial partners such as Broadcom, Intel and Texas Instruments.
While a RISC-V Linux port has existed for a while, users previously had to manually cross-compile the toolchain, kernel and any desired applications, resulting in an error-prone process that required a large amount of effort. Yocto makes this much easier: It provides a general build system together with descriptions of how to build hundreds of packages for different platforms — with a single command, it downloads and builds the RISC-V toolchain, Linux port, QEMU port and any desired packages (applying any RISC-V-specific patches). The results can be packaged into bootable file system images, RPM or DEB packages, or compiled into an SDK that can be shipped to users directly.
While riscv-poky is work-in-progress, it already supports a significant number of packages, including Bash, Dropbear SSH, Perl, Python and GCC on the target. We would like to encourage the community to contribute application-specific RISC-V ports to riscv-poky, in order to grow the number of supported packages over time.
You can clone riscv-poky on GitHub: https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-poky
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