What operating systems currently support Risc-V CPUs like the U740 ? I tried searching on Distrowatch but when I filterted to just Riscv or Riscv64 I only got ALT Linux as a result.
At least Fedora has a RISC-V option (which is the OS I’m planning to use). I’d be shocked if Debian didn’t have one too though.
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Pretty much all of the linux distros are available for RISC-V, though most are still considered experimental. This includes fedora, debian, opensuse, open embedded, buildroot, openwrt, etc. There are also non-linux options like FreeBSD, RTEMS, Zephyr, FreeRTOS, etc. You can find a list at
https://riscv.org/exchange/software/
though this a partial list since there are likely other OS ports that haven’t been added to the list yet.
The Unmatched board of course will require new drivers, and it may take time to get all of those drivers upstream. But I would expect the major linux distros like fedora and debian to add in those drivers pretty quickly. SiFive supports OpenEmbedded, so that should be available also. The board will probably ship with one of those 3 distros on the SDcard.
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I did some digging and Debian has a Risc-V port in progress but not finished yet. Fedora seems to list it as completed but on their website under downloads Risc-V doesn’t get listed under different architectures available in images which is weird. It’s just good to know there will be options.
Thanks for the link and info. Got it bookmarked now for future use.
That’s news to me as I’ve been using it daily for several years!
While RISC-V is not yet in the exclusive club of “official ports” (amd64, arm64, aremel, armhf, i386, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el, s390x) it’s “in progress” status is shared with such established ISAs as m68k, sparc64, x32, and sh4.
The vast majority of Debian packages work on RISC-V. There is a status list of those that don’t here:
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I am happy to be wrong ! I simply mistook it to mean unfinished or unreleased. My mistake.
I know multiple OSs support RISC-V. Do any of them have a functional desktop environment up and running as of yet?
Aw man, no intercal and openmsx on Debian! 
I’ve seen Debian and Fedora running with a GUI. It will likely work on any other distro also. But getting that working with the Unleashed is complicated as you either need the Microsemi expansion board or a Xlinix FPGA board+FMC to PCI converter+PCI expander box. This will be much easier with the Unmatched, and should be better supported and more widely available once Unmatched starts shipping.
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Debian and Fedora desktops work fine on the Unleashed using a normal PC as an XTerm and gigabit ethernet between them. It’s too slow for playing movies, but who needs that?
That’s much much cheaper as you probably already have a PC, but in any case a Raspberry Pi or old PC someone is throwing out work fine.
I’ve been working on a RISCV64 port of Haiku for a while now. We have a RISCV64 EFI bootloader generated, but u-boot is having some issues starting it at the moment (and EDK2’s RISCV64 stuff is pretty early)
On the bright side, we’re pretty early in the RISCV world, so able to improve some useful software for debugging RISCV64 
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