Alpine Linux 3.20.0 is out, with initial support for a whole new CPU architecture: RISC-V.
It also includes KDE Plasma 6 and GNOME 46, and due to Redis changing its license, Alpine has the new Valkey key-value database in its place.
The Register has looked at several releases of Alpine in recent years: in 2021, when it dropped MIPS64 support; then, more recently, we reviewed version 3.16 in 2022, and version 3.18 last year. That release resolved a longstanding issue by adding support for DNS over TCP.
With the latest release, the distro supports eight different architectures: IBM Z mainframes and POWER servers (the latter in 64-bit little-endian form), 64-bit bit RISC-V, both 32-bit and 64-bit x86, and three forms of Arm hardware: Armhf, ARMv7, and Aarch64 (which between cover every Raspberry Pi from the Pi Zero and 1 up to the Pi 5, along with multiple other Arm single board computers.)
