February 25, 2026
Silicon soap opera time
Running RISC-V in a VM to test my snaps
Dev runs RISC‑V in a snail‑slow VM—commenters yell “just buy a board”
TLDR: A dev tested his app on RISC‑V using a slow virtual machine because today’s cheap boards may not run the next Ubuntu release. Comments split between “buy the Orange Pi now” and “wait for the new‑standard boards,” spotlighting the early‑adopter headache of future‑proofing versus getting work done today.
A snap packager couldn’t find RISC‑V hardware, so he spun up a virtual machine on his ThinkPad and got Ubuntu running—slow, painfully slow, but working. When he asked the community about budget boards, one reply barked back: “Seems like a YOU problem” and dropped a link to the sub‑$200 Orange Pi RV2. Cue fireworks.
Others fired right back: the Orange Pi is based on an older setup and won’t run the next Ubuntu because a new RISC‑V baseline (think: a must‑have features checklist) lands in Ubuntu 25.10. A helpful voice, @xypron, basically said “don’t buy hardware yet,” because the new‑standard boards aren’t on shelves until 2026. Translation: buy now and get stuck on yesterday.
Meanwhile, the VM route became its own meme: the dev joked about “does the window paint?” tests, and commenters quipped it’s literally watching paint dry. Drama escalated over “LTS life” versus “live on the edge”—the newer emulator needed for testing isn’t in the long‑term support release, so some said upgrade already, while others clutched their stable setups. The “my wife won’t allow an IBM mainframe in the spare room” line had the thread cackling—same energy as everyone’s budget and space woes. The vibe: future‑proof vs. right‑now cheap, and nobody’s budging.
Key Points
- •A snap maintainer tested riscv64 builds using Ubuntu desktop in a QEMU VM due to lack of RISC-V hardware.
- •Ubuntu 24.04/core24 target RVA20, while Ubuntu 25.10/core26 require RVA23 with Vector and Hypervisor extensions.
- •RVA23 was ratified in October 2024; currently, RVA23-compliant consumer boards are not available.
- •Orange Pi RV2 (March 2025) supports RVA20 only and cannot run Ubuntu 25.10, highlighting hardware timing issues.
- •QEMU on Ubuntu 24.04 lacks support for the -cpu rva23s64 model; Ubuntu 25.10 or later is needed for RVA23 CPU emulation.