Red Hat Brings Their Enterprise Linux On SiFive Hardware!

I have worked with processor technology for well over 30 years. It was clear to me from the first product I worked with (88k from Motorola Semiconductor) that hardware was unable to make an impact on an industry without relevant, effective software support.

From my perspective, while is fair to indicate that the era of AI is reducing the ties of software to underlying hardware...or “hardware is eating the world” as some care to describe it….there is still a critical need to deliver complete, stable foundational software in order for hardware technology to flourish in a specific market and application area.

Today, SiFive announced a collaboration with Red Hat to deliver a developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 for RISC-V. The developer preview is available exclusively on our HiFive Premier™ P550 board. In essence, a Developer Preview is a way for Red Hat to engage with its community and gather valuable feedback on upcoming features before they are finalized and released as part of a supported product. This Developer Preview enables early adopters and integrators to experiment with new features and provide feedback to Red Hat. The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 was released in December 2024.

With RISC-V starting with an open standards approach, the primary way of maturing a new ISA is by having a development platform that hardware and software developers can use. As a participant in the open-source communities that strive to enable solutions to customer problems and business needs, Red Hat understands that some members of the ecosystem will naturally gravitate to Fedora and CentOS STREAM and the rapid innovation they deliver, while others are interested in a slightly slower pace for other parts of the ecosystem.

I feel that Red Hat’s decision to start their hardware integration with SiFive sends a clear message about the quality, performance and technical support that this board provides. That said, it is also important to give a shout out to the significant impact of the open-source community, particularly those invested in the RISE Project, for their work to continue to port, optimize and upstream the critical pieces of RISC-V enabling code that are making this market-disrupting milestone a reality.

This highly anticipated software is immediately available. Red Hat staff is showcasing the software running on the P550 at this week’s Red Hat Summit in Boston where customers, partners and analysts can view a hands-on demonstration. It is a non-trivial decision to embark on a path to support a new processor architecture, and I view this as an important commitment that supports the growing importance and acceptance of RISC-V for high-performance use cases.

In many ways, this is not the end of the journey, it is the start. There is much foundational work still to be done by SiFive, Red Hat, other RISC-V members as well as in the broader open-source community. This work will ultimately enable RISC-V to compete on a level playing field with incumbent architectures in the Enterprise server market. Today’s announcement with Red Hat is a massive step forward and the SiFive team is eager to continue to contribute in doing its part on the journey ahead.

May 22 update

I mentioned above about the linkages between Red Hat software and other distributions. Within a day of the announcement of our collaboration with Red Hat, there were three important updates:

1. A blog post as issued on the CentOS community page outlining plans for RISC-V support

2. Rocky Linux announced intent to add RISC-V images to their distribution

3. On the public Fedora channel, Alma also claimed: "FWIW AlmaLinux will be supporting it with 10 too, we're just not making flashy blog posts about it."

All of this activity will provide more options for developers, inspiring innovation and creating highly differentiated platforms for the end customer base.