RISC-V Distros

Sources

Where every claim on this site comes from, how it was judged, and who we thank

Every technical claim on this site should trace back to a source you can click. Below are all of them, laid out by primary and secondary source, with a note on how each claim was judged. The site’s data is re-verified automatically once a day, and every entry carries its check date.

1. Where the test results come from: the RuyiSDK support matrix

Every “this system does / does not work on this board” claim on the site is based first and foremost on the official RuyiSDK test matrix:

  • Site: https://matrix.ruyisdk.org/
  • Source repository (the data itself — one markdown file with YAML front matter per board and system): https://github.com/ruyisdk/support-matrix
  • How we ingest it: we pull that repository daily and parse the sys / sys_ver / sys_var / status / last_update fields of each test report, then map them onto the site’s board × distro combinations
  • Reports follow the pattern https://matrix.ruyisdk.org/reports/<板>/<系统>/<变体>/ (board / system / variant). The matrix cells and the “RuyiSDK test report” tables on the distro and board pages link straight to the original

Thanks: the RuyiSDK team and PLCT Lab (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences) have long maintained this per-board, per-system test data. It is one of the few third-party test sets in the RISC-V ecosystem that can be independently checked, and we rely on it rather than reinventing the wheel.

What the status values mean (quoted from that repository’s CONTRIBUTING.md)

StatusMeaning
goodFully usable — good enough to run a desktop environment
basicBasically usable: it boots and is workable over a serial console
partOnly partial functionality
cftAn image exists, but it still needs to be verified on real hardware
cfhOfficial docs or the community say it is supported, but it fails to boot in testing
cfiOfficial docs claim support, but no usable image exists yet
wipOnly a “will be supported” claim — no image and no source

In the site’s matrix, a cell with a solid symbol is data measured by RuyiSDK; a cell with only a grey dot is site-sourced information that RuyiSDK has not tested. The legend distinguishes the two.

2. Official sources for the distros

For all 26 distro entries, the Download and Install docs links point at official pages: the distro’s own download site, official documentation site, official wiki or official repository. The typical groups:

The “Sources for this page” section at the bottom of each distro page lists every link that entry is based on.

3. Board vendor sources

Specifications and official system information for the 25 boards come from vendor product pages, vendor documentation sites and vendor repositories, for example:

For a few of the newer boards the hardware details come straight from the board metadata in the RuyiSDK matrix; those entries are marked on the page as “board information taken from the RuyiSDK test matrix record; availability and pricing not independently verified”.

4. The AI software dimension: evidence for every line

The AI support pages don’t go on impressions — every judgement has a link behind it, mainly from:

Where we could not find public evidence, the page says “no public evidence found” instead of guessing.

5. Secondary sources and how we label them

Anything a media outlet reported is marked as second-hand: it never serves as primary evidence and is only there to show that the claim exists. Common sources include CNX Software, Phoronix, ServeTheHome, The Register, The Next Platform and Design & Reuse, plus, on the Chinese side, ITHome, ICSmart, Shanghai Observer, Science and Technology Daily and Caixin. Performance and deployment claims made by vendors themselves (for example “32-way concurrent inference reaches 95.8% of an x86 platform” or “already deployed in intelligent computing centres in multiple regions”) are always labelled “vendor-reported” and kept separate from third-party measurements.

6. Method and caveats

  • Check dates: every entry has a checked field, shown on the page as a “last checked” date. The data is re-verified automatically at 03:00 every day
  • No guessing: fields we cannot find are left blank. If a vendor has not published a price, a TDP or the exact SoC model, we would rather leave it out than put in a number that looks reasonable
  • Link checking: every outbound link on the site is verified one by one with curl by scripts/check_urls.py. Dead links are replaced with a stable index page or the official download page; if nothing suitable exists, the link is removed
  • Corrections: if you spot a problem, open an issue or an MR with the specific entry and the supporting link — we change things according to the evidence

7. Acknowledgements

Thanks to these projects and teams; the data on this site is built on their work:

  • The RuyiSDK team / PLCT Lab (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences) — the per-board, per-system test matrix, our single most important data source
  • The distro communities and maintainers — Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Alpine, Arch Linux RISC-V, Gentoo, NixOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, ALT Linux, Buildroot, Yocto and others
  • The board vendors and their communities — SiFive, StarFive, Sipeed, Milk-V, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, SpacemiT, ESWIN, UltraRISC, Canaan, Zhihe, PINE64, BIT-BRICK
  • The Chinese distro teams — openEuler RISC-V SIG, openKylin, deepin, openRuyi
  • The open-source AI projects — llama.cpp, ONNX Runtime, OpenCV, ncnn, Tengine, RISE Project
  • RISC-V International — the specifications and the ecosystem infrastructure