CentOS Stream 10 will support RISC-V architecture when it ships, Red Hat's Troy Dawson announced at CentOS Connect in Brussels last week. The timing matters: this follows Red Hat's May 2025 developer preview for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550, making RISC-V the first new instruction set architecture in RHEL since ARM support landed in version 7.2 back in 2016.
The practical challenge is hardware availability. Dawson was blunt: "We will offer an image for hardware that is buyable, although someone has to make hardware that the general public can buy first." The SiFive HiFive P550 exists but remains developer-focused, not a consumer product. Rocky Linux 10 will support the StarFive VisionFive 2 fully, with partial SiFive support and QEMU for testing, but treats RISC-V as non-primary architecture.
What this means in practice: RISC-V support signals Red Hat's bet on the open-source ISA's future in edge computing and embedded systems. Unlike proprietary x86 or ARM, RISC-V's royalty-free licensing appeals to hardware makers. NVIDIA porting CUDA to RISC-V (announced July 2025) and the ratified RVA23 profile suggest the ecosystem is maturing. Meta runs CentOS Stream at scale, though for what workloads Red Hat won't say.
The enterprise angle remains developer preview territory, not production infrastructure. CentOS Stream's upstream role (it feeds RHEL development) means early RISC-V support helps hardware partners test enterprise workloads before committing. History suggests caution: ARM took years to move from interesting to deployed at scale.
Three things to watch: which SiFive boards actually ship to developers, whether CentOS Stream 10 launches with day-one RISC-V images or follows later, and how quickly driver support matures beyond basic functionality. The announcement matters more for direction than immediate deployment.
Worth noting: CentOS Stream survived Red Hat killing CentOS Linux in 2020 by becoming RHEL's upstream. The community is smaller than CentOS Linux's was, but includes some of the biggest infrastructure operators. A quokka mascot, announced last month, coincidentally matches Ubuntu 25.04's Questing Quokka release.