riscv-linux

The first version which boots on RISC-V hardware (and QEMU) out of the box. Previous versions needed out of tree patches[1] for essential IRQ and device driver support. Excellent work by many people getting these upstream. [1] https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux

You can already run Debian [0] RISCV. [0] https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux

Kernel mailing list: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1705.2/05551.html Repo: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux

Apart from buying an actual dev kit like HiFive from SiFive, a great way to get into it is to buy SiFive's FPGA kits https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ The FPGA board can be used for other things too. If you are really adventurous, I'd suggest buying a FPGA board with better chip so you can fit in larger IP blocks in the future. It will work perfectly fine as a replacement for the above FPGA kit I've linked to. My suggestion would be this[1]. It has a pretty large LUT count so you can go nuts. The RAM and Ethernet will be pretty useful if you want to run linux[2] and test out stuff. It'll be a bit hard to run linux on it right now. On the other hand, you can choose a Parallela board[3] which comes with a FPGA chip along with a new (soon to be retired) arch called epiphany. Here[4] is a GSoC project which runs linux on that