RISC-V Summit 2023

To facilitate the broader adoption of the RISC-V platform across various applications, Linux distribution plays a crucial role in reducing entry barriers for users and developers. Linux distro provides a familiar environment and toolset, enabling developers to easily begin their RISC-V journey and encouraging the development of software for this platform. In this topic, we discuss Debian distro enablement on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 platform, and optimization from a distro perspective, including GPU, codec, and crypto block. Our initial focus was on showcasing working applications such as LibreOffice and Firefox, with the goal of proving the required middleware and software packages works well for the RISC-V platform. Swiftly after that, a lot of effort has been pouring in in optimization after the discovery of obvious performance gaps when compared with other platforms like ARM which has similar hardware performance. Hence this sharing will share some of the findings and optimization we did to date. Hope this sharing will foster more collaboration and exchange of ideas within the RISC-V software community in fuelling the software ecosystem from a performance perspective.