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

Red Hat engineer Marcin Juszkiewicz highlights severe performance issues with current RISC-V hardware for Fedora Linux package builds. Building GNU Binutils on RISC-V takes ~143 minutes without LTO, compared to ~29 minutes on x86_64 with 8 cores — roughly 5x slower. Even POWER PPC64LE and AArch64 are significantly faster. To compensate, the team uses QEMU with 80 emulated RISC-V cores, which still takes ~4 hours to compile LLVM versus 10+ hours on real RISC-V hardware. The team plans to start building Fedora 44 but notes that LTO will remain disabled. Faster RISC-V builders are planned, but RISC-V becoming an official primary Fedora architecture requires hardware capable of building Binutils in under an hour with LTO enabled.