RISC-V Single Board Computers Are Sloooow

Fedora struggles bringing its RISC-V variant online due to slow build times – OSnews

Red Hat developer Marcin Juszkiewicz is working on the RISC-V port of Fedora Linux, and after a few months of working on it, published a blog post about just how incredibly slow RISC-V seems to be. This is a real problem, as in Fedora, build results are only released once all architectures have completed their builds. There is no point of going for inclusion with slow builders as this will make package maintainers complain. You see, in Fedora b…

RISC-V single board computers are sloooow

Marcin Juszkiewicz, in working with the RISC-V port of Fedora Linux, characterizes the “speed, or rather lack of it”, on the hardware. RISC-V builders have four or eight cores with 8, 16 or 32 GB of RAM (depending on a board). And those cores are usually compared to Arm Cortex-A55 ones. The lowest CPU cores in today’s Arm chips. Catch the specifics in the post here.

Current RISC-V CPUs Being Too Slow Causes Headaches For Fedora: ~5x Slower Builds

The current crop of RISC-V SoCs are still much slower than alternative CPU architectures and lead to much longer build times for Fedora packages as a result. There's hope with next-gen RISC-V processors being faster but for now even compiling Binutils as an example is around five times slower than x86_64 -- and that's with disabling compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) for RISC-V to avoid an even longer build process...