Running RISC-V in a VM to test my snaps(blog.popey.com)
blog.popey.com
Running RISC-V in a VM to test my snaps
https://blog.popey.com/2026/02/running-risc-v-in-a-vm-to-test-my-snaps/
3 comments
"The problem? I don’t own any RISC-V hardware."
Seems like a YOU problem. There is PLENTY of affordable (< 200 USD) RISC-V Orange Pi RV2 boards available for immediate shipment. http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontro...
Shoot, if you are testing LOTS of architectures, then get a FPGA dev board and test away. I can't testify about the availability of a IBM 360 open source firmware design, but I know for a fact that Xilinx makes RISC-V available.
As the author notes,
> Here’s the fun bit: as of right now, there are essentially zero RVA23-compliant RISC-V boards you can actually buy. They’re coming – a handful of promising-looking boards from Sipeed, Milk-V, Banana Pi and others are expected around April/May 2026 – but they’re not on shelves yet. Even the Orange Pi RV2, released in March 2025, is RVA20 only, which means it already can’t run Ubuntu 25.10. Ouch.
I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu or Snaps to say how much of a pain it would be to just use an older OS version, but if someone is in the Ubuntu ecosystem I certainly wouldn't blame them for not wanting to spend money on hardware that the OS has already deprecated.
(And IMHO the complete lack of available hardware means that Ubuntu made a poor choice here, but that's rather beside the point; this author is working inside a specific existing ecosystem, and their choices seem reasonable in that context.)
Although, thinking further.... I do wonder if it wouldn't be better to explicitly use RVA20 with a compatible OS (probably Ubuntu 24.04) in order to ship binaries that are as compatible as possible. Like, if you ship a snap that uses RVA23 instructions, your app won't work on existing hardware, right? (Whether that hardware is running Ubuntu 20.04, or Debian, or Gentoo, or...)
> Here’s the fun bit: as of right now, there are essentially zero RVA23-compliant RISC-V boards you can actually buy. They’re coming – a handful of promising-looking boards from Sipeed, Milk-V, Banana Pi and others are expected around April/May 2026 – but they’re not on shelves yet. Even the Orange Pi RV2, released in March 2025, is RVA20 only, which means it already can’t run Ubuntu 25.10. Ouch.
I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu or Snaps to say how much of a pain it would be to just use an older OS version, but if someone is in the Ubuntu ecosystem I certainly wouldn't blame them for not wanting to spend money on hardware that the OS has already deprecated.
(And IMHO the complete lack of available hardware means that Ubuntu made a poor choice here, but that's rather beside the point; this author is working inside a specific existing ecosystem, and their choices seem reasonable in that context.)
Although, thinking further.... I do wonder if it wouldn't be better to explicitly use RVA20 with a compatible OS (probably Ubuntu 24.04) in order to ship binaries that are as compatible as possible. Like, if you ship a snap that uses RVA23 instructions, your app won't work on existing hardware, right? (Whether that hardware is running Ubuntu 20.04, or Debian, or Gentoo, or...)
Makes sense for all the people running Ubuntu under emulated RISC-V who want/need to use snaps for package management, I guess?
Since there aren't boards available that can run 25.10, why even bother packaging for that architecture? Why dig trenches for cable that can't be laid?
Makes no sense to me.
Since there aren't boards available that can run 25.10, why even bother packaging for that architecture? Why dig trenches for cable that can't be laid?
Makes no sense to me.