Currently, it supports a wide variety of CPU architectures like aarch64 (64-bit ARM), ppc64le (64-bit PowerPC little-endian), x86-64 (64-bit Intel/AMD), and loongarch64 (64-bit Loongson).
Unfortunately, there is some bad news that affects users of the RISC-V architecture.
What's Happening: The Chimera Linux team has decided to drop support for RISC-V hardware, citing many issues with the architecture that are beyond their control.
You see, for offering native RISC-V support, they had to emulate RISC-V on a high-end x86 machine with QEMU-user binfmt emulation, alongside cbuild for creating new Chimera Linux builds.
However, they faced many issues with this approach, where builds would fail randomly due to issues with QEMU, cause high power consumption on the x86 machine, and RISC-V packages being built without any tests.
They followed this approach because most RISC-V hardware that was accessible and affordable was too weak to build Chimera Linux on, and hardware that could run it, cost too much, or was not available due to sanctions and whatnot.
Before you go on to say that the developers didn't give RISC-V a fair chance, keep in mind that they gave it plenty of time ever since they started working on providing RISC-V support back in 2021. However, they believe that the hardware never matured to a satisfactory level.
What to Expect: Going forward, all new builds of Chimera Linux for RISC-V will be stopped, with the repositories being frozen and no new updates being provided for it.
There is a possibility that RISC-V support might be reintroduced.
According to the Chimera Linux developers:
If acceptable build hardware is released and is reasonably available to us, the architecture will be reintroduced.
If that happens, the repositories will be rebuilt from scratch, as if a new architecture, with a process similar to how it was recently done with LoongArch64. It will be a tier-2 architecture with enforced tests and without LTO just like LoongArch64.
They do admit that the possibility of all that happening (as stated in the quotes above) is unpredictable, and they will focus on existing supported architectures.
The announcement blog is a must-read if you want to read the detailed account of how the Chimera Linux developers arrived at this decision.
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