Comment by alexrp
1 day ago
> You still need a custom distro for Raspberry Pi for example.
Are you sure that's still the case? I just checked the Raspberry Pi Imager and I see several "stock" distro options that aren't Raspbian.
Regardless, I take your point that we're reliant on vendors actually doing the upstreaming work for device trees (and drivers). But so far the recognizable players in the RISC-V space do all(?) seem to be doing that, so for now I remain hopeful that we can avoid the Arm mess.
I'm not totally sure, but I would imagine those stock distros actually have dedicated packages for Raspberry Pi kernel images.
See this for example: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-5-Ethernet-Linux
If you look at the patch series, it's directly adding information about the address of the ethernet device. That's the sort of thing that would be discovered automatically in the x86 world. It wouldn't need to be hard-coded into the kernel for each individual board that is supported.