The RISC-V architecture may be about to gain support for booting using UEFI. Atish Patra posted version 5 of a patch series that includes the necessary ‘efistub’ support used to hand off from a suitable bootloader (such as GRUB2, widely used on x86 and Arm systems already) to a RISC-V build of Linux. This should improve the ability for distributions to release general-purpose versions for RISC-V systems without needing to tailor to each platform.
Sumit Semwal posted an updated (version 5) set of patches adding support for “Anonymous VMA naming patches” to Linux. VMAs (Virtual Memory Areas) are used to represent memory allocated by programs, and anonymous memory means that not backed by an underlying file, such as malloc allocations done at runtime. It should be easier to boot Android userspace on mainline Linux after these land.
Finally this month, in an example of incredible commitment to doing the right thing, Robert Richter posted an update about maintenance of certain Marvell hardware going forward. He and a number of others recently left the company, but he is volunteering to do his best to help send “odd fixes” where he can. We feel that this shows tremendous dedication.