This presentation focuses on the perspective of an Operating System maintainer - how easy it is to add RISC-V support to a Linux based operating system nowadays.

The case study is done on a FOSS Operating System - Flatcar Container Linux. Flatcar Container Linux (https://flatcar.org) is a Container-optimized Linux distribution, CNCF incubated project, which has Gentoo as an upstream distribution.

We will go through the steps required to add RISC-V support, from the Linux Kernel quirks, the bootloader paradigms, and to the generic software support from the wider community: systemd, Docker, Kubernetes.

An important part that will be thoroughly presented is the current state of the art hardware availability combined with virtualization support, very much needed for testing and faster iteration.