RISC-V is sloooow – Marcin Juszkiewicz

A Fedora Linux porter shares three months of experience working on the RISC-V port. The core issue is severe build performance: RISC-V hardware takes 143 minutes to build binutils compared to 36 minutes on aarch64, with current builders limited to Cortex-A55-class cores and 8–32 GB RAM. LTO is disabled system-wide to reduce memory pressure and build times. QEMU with 80 emulated cores is used as a workaround, cutting LLVM build time from 10.5 hours to ~4 hours. Upcoming hardware like the UltraRISC UR-DP1000 and SpacemiT K3 may help, but server-grade rackable RISC-V hardware is needed before the architecture can become a primary Fedora target. Plans include starting Fedora 44 builds and assigning heavier packages to faster builders when available.