TL;DR

RISE did it’s job, and in the past couple of years RISC-V support has found its way into stable releases of key infrastructure software like Debian. So from a software perspective, it’s arguable that RISC-V is now ready for production. Progress has been a little slower on the hardware front, but hardware is… hard; and there was always going to be something of a chicken and egg problem between hardware and software.

Background

It’s been a couple of years since my “What to expect from Dart & Flutter on RISC-V” talk at Droidcon Berlin. My review slide said “Some big chunks of infrastructure aren’t ready yet”, “Looks like >2y but <5y work from here”.

On the software side my most optimistic forecast has played out. On the hardware side, not so much.

Linux is ready

RISC-V made it into the Debian 13 “Trixie” release, which became stable last month. That now means that the huge range of Docker images that start “FROM debian” can now add RISC-V to their build matrix without depending on stuff that’s still considered beta.

Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble”, which is a Long Term Support (LTS) release beat Debian to it by 16 months, and we used it for the Atsign Dart buildimage over that period.

Alpine, which is the basis for lots of ‘slim’ container images, also got RISC-V support back in its 3.20 release in May 2024, and that’s found its way into Dockerhub base images.

Dart is ready

Dart for RISC-V made it into the stable channel with the 3.3 release back in Feb 2024, meaning that for a short while there was no stable Linux release to run it on; but that wasn’t a long wait.

Android seems stalled

In Apr 2024 RISC-V support was dropped from the Android Common Kernel, leading to headlines like “RISC-V support in Android just got a big setback“.

The Google explanation was, “Due to the rapid rate of iteration, we are not ready to provide a single supported image for all vendors”. That implies that behind the scenes Google is working with a bunch of vendors. But that work isn’t visible in public repos.

Which brings us on to…

No RISC-V Android handset (or tablet) yet

Hardware is hard, and the economics of production lean against doing small runs of ‘beta’ things[1].

Some of the (Chinese) manufacturers might be on the cusp of releasing stuff, but until they do it will only be those inside the NDA’d ring of trust who know anything about it.

SoCs seem stalled

The dev boards I’m using today are the ones I already had in 2023. The StarFive VisionFive 2[2] (running a JH7110) and the BeagleV-Ahead (which uses a T-Head TH1520).

Talking to an ex Arm and SiFive exec a little while ago the penny dropped for me that there have been a lot a vapourwear RISC-V SoC announcements, presumably so that orgs could squeeze a better licensing deal from Arm by showing that there could be some competition. That said… I still expected the Chinese manufacturers to go harder in on RISC-V, though recenly it feels like all eyes are on GPUs rather than CPUs.

GhostWrite casts its shadow

In Aug 2024 news broke of a vulnerability named ‘GhostWrite’ in the T-Head C910 and C920 cores (and some other problems with C906 and C908). Those cores were in many popular dev boards, and also the pioneering RISC-V cloud Elastic Metal RV1 instances from Scaleway.

GhostWrite will likely have dented confidence in RISC-V (though I think the methods that found it will make the ecosystem stronger in the longer term). The mitigation for it will also have have impacted performance for those wanting to test on RISC-V. Performance was never great, but with a mitigation overhead it will have gone from poor to very poor.

The arrival of newer SoCs, and dev boards, and cloud instances based on them could have shown that GhostWrite was just a hiccup. But that simply hasn’t happened yet.

Clouds

Scaleway is still out there on its own, repeating the story that played out previously with Arm. It means that there’s a way of turning cash into RISC-V testing capacity. But there’s no glimpse yet of services from the mainstream hyperscalers; not even the sort of thing they did with Arm early on.

Chicken and Egg

There was always going to be the problem that hardware people wait for software support, and software people wait for easily available software. I think we now have the software chicken (or is it the egg?), and that’s largely down to the success of the RISE initiative. But it will probably be a few more years before the hardware is competitive with Arm, and of course that’s a moving target.

Meanwhile if you’re content with dev boards that have roughly Raspberry Pi 3 levels of performance RISC-V is ready for production.

Notes

[1] Apple sort of get away with this with (relatively) low volume (and higher price) initial versions of things like the iPad and Vision Pro, which (if successful) get followed by a better and cheaper v2. But they’re able to do that because they can command a premium price from early adopters for the v1.
[2] As I write there’s a Kickstarter running for the VisionFive 2 Lite, but that’s essentially the same dev board shrunk to a Raspberry Pi form factor.

Updates

5 Sep 2025 – David Chisnall just posted something about CHERI which reminded me that I’d meant to put a section on CHERI into this post (and then forgot – doh!). I was going to say that the RISC-V Android profile is maybe our best hope of CHERI becoming a widespread thing, but so far as I can tell that’s an opportunity that’s slipping away, which is bad and sad, as we all deserve better memory safety, and those 6.5 billion lines of C (and another 2.25 billion lines of C++) aren’t going to magically rewrite themselves into Rust. If you’re wondering why you should care then this excellent EMFcamp presentation from Peter Sewell should explain – “CHERI and Arm Morello: mitigating the terrible legacy of memory-safety security issues, in practice at scale“.

5 Sep 2025 – LivingLinux on Bluesky pointed out that there is a RISC-V tablet from Pine64 (the PINETAB-V). It looks like a VisionFive 2 dev board plus a screen (and keyboard), and ships with Debian rather than Android.
They also took pains to highlight that GhostWrite was just T-HEAD cores, and there’s “a SpacemiT K1/M1 RISC-V chip with vectors without the GhostWrite issue”.
Lastly, “Google was waiting for RVA23, and RVA23 hardware will arrive in a couple of months”. So hopefully more updates to follow…