Architectures/RISC-V/Installing

This page describes the steps necessary to get Fedora for RISC-V running, either on emulated or real hardware.

Quickstart

This section assumes that you have already set up libvirt/QEMU on your machine and you're familiar with them, so it only highlights the details that are specific to RISC-V. It also assumes that you're running Fedora 40 as the host.

First of all, you need to download a disk image from https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/risc-v/disk_images/Fedora-40/

As of this writing, the most recent image is Fedora-Minimal-40-20240502.n.0-sda.raw.xz so I will be using that throughout the section. If you're using a different image, you will need to adjust things accordingly.

Once you've downloaded the image, start by uncompressing it:

$ unxz Fedora-Minimal-40-20240502.n.0-sda.raw.xz

You need to figure out the root filesystem's UUID so that you can later pass this information to the kernel. The virt-filesystems utility, part of the guestfs-tools package, takes care of that:

$ virt-filesystems \
    -a Fedora-Minimal-40-20240502.n.0-sda.raw \
    --long \
    --uuid \
  | grep ^btrfsvol: \
  | awk '{print $7}' \
  | sort -u
ae525e47-51d5-4c98-8442-351d530612c3

Additionally, you need to extract the kernel and initrd from the disk image. The virt-get-kernel tool automates this step:

$ virt-get-kernel \
    -a Fedora-Minimal-40-20240502.n.0-sda.raw
download: /boot/vmlinuz-6.8.7-300.4.riscv64.fc40.riscv64 -> ./vmlinuz-6.8.7-300.4.riscv64.fc40.riscv64
download: /boot/initramfs-6.8.7-300.4.riscv64.fc40.riscv64.img -> ./initramfs-6.8.7-300.4.riscv64.fc40.riscv64.img

Now move all the files to a directory that libvirt has access to:

$ sudo mv
    Fedora-Minimal-40-20240502.n.0-sda.raw \
    vmlinuz-6.8.7-300.4.riscv64.fc40.riscv64 \
    initramfs-6.8.7-300.4.riscv64.fc40.riscv64.img \
    /var/lib/libvirt/images/

At this point, everything is ready and you can create the libvirt VM:

$ virt-install \
    --import \
    --name fedora-riscv \
    --osinfo fedora40 \
    --arch riscv64 \
    --vcpus 4 \
    --ram 4096 \
    --boot uefi,kernel=/var/lib/libvirt/images/vmlinuz-6.8.7-300.4.riscv64.fc40.riscv64,initrd=/var/lib/libvirt/images/initramfs-6.8.7-300.4.riscv64.fc40.riscv64.img,cmdline='root=UUID=ae525e47-51d5-4c98-8442-351d530612c3 ro rootflags=subvol=root rhgb LANG=en_US.UTF-8 console=ttyS0 earlycon=sbi' \
    --disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/Fedora-Minimal-40-20240502.n.0-sda.raw \
    --network default \
    --graphics none

Note how the UUID discovered earlier is included in the kernel command line. Quoting is also very important to get right.

You should see a bunch of output coming from edk2 (the UEFI implementation we're using), followed by the usual kernel boot messages and, eventually, a login prompt. Please be patient, as the use of emulation makes everything significantly slower. Additionally, a SELinux relabel followed by a reboot will be performed as part of the import process, which slows things down further. Subsequent boots will be a lot faster.

To shut down the VM, run poweroff inside the guest OS. To boot it up again, use

$ virsh start fedora-riscv --console