>     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.