All :

     I am fairly certain that the Debian folks have had a slew of basic
packages for RISC-V ready for some years. I ran some tests of that
situation last year. Also, unrelated, FreeBSD has a pretty darn good
install process for RISC-V also. Which is to say that the packages in
the FreeBSD ports are really quite clean for compile and run on RISC-V.
Which is a good thing given that a ton of that stuff is the stuff people
want like OBS for streaming and FFMpeg and whatever. I have not yet done
a test with the Gentoo Linux install process and perhaps I should.

     In any case there is pretty slick support for the SiFive RISC-V
hardware in the baseline Linux kernel as well as a whole slew of
packages that should "just work". At least in theory.

     The trick then, as they say, is the boot loader ( GRUB2 ) and then
the initramfs and goodies for the minimal installer. So I am thinking
that I can certainly do some work on this.

     Also, the same idea goes for IBM POWER9 architecture.

--
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken

[1] hardware on hand is the HiFive Unmatched Rev B
[2] also real soon now https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550