Drew DeVault

A hands-on account of porting Alpine Linux to RISC-V architecture on the HiFive Unleashed board. Covers the two-phase process: bootstrapping (cross-compiler setup, musl libc patching for RISC-V, building essential packages) and the broader porting effort. The author encountered and fixed several bugs in the RISC-V musl libc patch, integrated Alpine's bootstrap script, and discusses the tradeoff between cross-compilation and native builds. Plans include making RISC-V build cycles publicly available via builds.sr.ht, and a preliminary Alpine RISC-V repository is shared for early adopters.

Porting Alpine Linux to RISC-V