Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora have had distributions for many years. Others like FreeBSD, etc also exist. I often take a break and spend a day working entirely on a RISC-V host (BeagleV beta). Everything I care about work 100% the same, most notably Emacs and all the dev tools (Rust, C, Haskell).
The only thing that I hit in the (old) Fedora 33/RISC-V is Firefox's lacking support for WASM, but that could be working in the latest version.
If you want to try it for yourself under QEMU, I'd recommend following the instruction here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V
SiFive released the Linux capable RISC-V dev kits years ago and for long time now there has been many options besides what SiFive offers. Only few however are “cheap”.
Maybe not mad, but certainly not very good at searching.
CORRECTION: 2010 was the _founding_ of the RISC-V project. I don't have the date of the 1.0 release, but nobody would ship hardware based on a 1.0. Release 2.2 (user)/1.11 (priv) wasn't released until 2018! Light of this, hardware is actually coming out pretty quickly.
Hardware is expensive and takes a long time. In comparison, Arm was founded in 1990. When was the first Linux-capable Arm-based dev board available for purchase?
I'm probably as unhappy with the delays as anyone, but the momentum has not slowed and better options _will_ become available for sale.
Advanced RISC Machines Ltd was founded in 1991, but one of their parent companies (Acorn) had already shipped over 100,000 ARM-based desktop computers at that point.
The RISC-V ISA design was started in 2010. The ARM ISA design was started in 1983.
> Arm was founded in 1990. When was the first Linux-capable Arm-based dev board available for purchase?
I think the first Linux-capable ARM-based dev board was available for purchase in 01989: the Acorn/BBC A3000 had an ARM2; the outdated https://www.arm.linux.org.uk/machines/riscpc/ says, "The support for these machines is now beginning to become increasingly difficult, however there is still support for them in the Linux kernel."
2. Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd., was spun out of Acorn in 01990, but the Acorn RISC Machine project started in 01983 and the ARM1 was first fabbed successfully in 01985. So the A3000 was shipped six years after the design effort began and four years after the first working ARM hardware.
Your use of zero before the actual year, as though you’re a COBOL-addled Long Now fanatic, makes me want to think the value is in octal. C brain damage on my part, no doubt.
D1 is indeed the first mass-produced Linux-capable RISC-V SoC.
SiFive made something like 500 HiFive Unleashed boards and probably 2000-3000 HiFive Unmatched. They all used effectively prototype chips, made on MPW / Shuttle run.
When the D1 came out I heard the initial production batch was 2 million chips. As with the SoCs that go into Raspberry Pis, the SBCs are a side-line.
The only thing that I hit in the (old) Fedora 33/RISC-V is Firefox's lacking support for WASM, but that could be working in the latest version.
If you want to try it for yourself under QEMU, I'd recommend following the instruction here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V