Supported boards/hardware/machines: riscv64

[eshattow]

Hi all, I tried to install Home Assistant and was surprised this was not already underway for RISC-V. It may be time to allow riscv64 to join the Home Assistant supported machine architectures listing?

Package coverage is very good in upstream Debian GNU/Linux and debian-installer. Hardware riscv64 boards are widely available and comparable in cost to the existing supported Raspberry Pi boards.

An example: I have the StarFive JH7110 CPU installed in Home Assistant Yellow PoE hardware as a CM4-compatible module (Milk-V Mars CM Lite). This same CPU is being used by Framework with their RISC-V developer laptop mainboard announcement, was announced as supported by an official Ubuntu OS image, and has widest distribution from multiple global suppliers in the form of a reference board from StarFive as the VisionFive2, and also Pine64 Star64. There are many other interesting RISC-V CPUs and I mention in particular the JH7110 because of availability as a CM4 compatible module which I know firsthand to be working in official Home Assistant Yellow PoE product with upstream Linux and upstream U-Boot as firmware.

I was referred here from home-assistant/os-agent#191

[agners]

Bring-up of a new architecture should start with support in Home Assistant Core. For HAOS and Supervised installations we build on the container version of HA Core, so that is where it has to start. The HA Core containers are built using Alpine, for a while this was a road block. With Alpine 3.20 that road block is finally gone, RISC-V is officially supported 🎉 .

The next obstacle is to build all the Python wheels HA Core depends on. We have our own wheels builder (at https://github.com/home-assistant/wheels) which builds wheels for Alpine (musllinux). This would need to be extended to support the riscv64 architecture. As it seems, currently PyPI (more specifically manylinux images, see pypa/manylinux#1426) and the tools around PyPI like auditwheel (pypa/auditwheel#408) do not support riscv64 officially yet. Once riscv64 is enabled, it will be interesting to see if all the Python wheels build. Quite some have native code which needs to be compiled. Simple native code probably just works, but at times a new architecture still requires changes to make it actually work. YMMV.

The lack of really good board options is a bit of a blocker. Granted the StarFive JH7110 is somewhat viable for this, but is really on the lower end in terms of performance, from what I can tell.

That said, if you'd like to start investigate: Adding riscv64 support in a fork of the above wheels repo is probably a good way. Once you have a wheels builder, you can run it and see if (all) the wheels are building.

[olof-nord]

Just for the sake of documentation and for future reference - PRs which add RISC-V support to Home Assitant is currently not welcomed.
For example here: home-assistant/tempio#75

What I understand is that once an architectural proposal has been approved, changes such as that one are welcome.