We are very happy to announce the immediate availability of two new RISC-V hosts: cfarm93 running upstream Debian, and cfarm94 running upstream Alpine Linux. Both hosts are StarFive VisionFive 2 boards, which is currently the RISC-V hardware with the best balance of upstream software support and performance. We use a fully upstream version of u-boot as well as a near-upstream Linux kernel: the only addition to the upstream kernel are PCIe patches that are pending upstream integration, so that we can use a NVMe drive on the boards.

The hardware was sponsored by RISC-V International, while NVMe drives and hosting are provided by tetaneutral.net. Many thanks to both organizations for their support.

The farm already provides experimental RISC-V hosts since July 2022: cfarm91 (VisionFive 1) and cfarm92 (HiFive Unmatched). However, they clearly provide much less performance than the new boards, and their hardware is no longer produced. We will keep these old hosts online on a best-effort basis while the hardware is working, but without much expectations (e.g. without OS upgrades).