Re: Inquiry Regarding RISC-V Architecture Support

On 1/13/26 07:28, 黄言伟 wrote:
> Dear OpenPrinting Team,
> 
> I hope this email finds you well. Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience. I am an enthusiast of RISC-V architecture and own several RISC-V devices. I am writing to inquire whether OpenPrinting supports the RISC-V architecture.
> 
> If support is available, could you kindly provide guidance on how to install and run printer drivers on my RISC-V devices? Any assistance you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thank you for your time and support.
> 
> Best regards,
> Yanwei
> 

The printing stack consisting of CUPS, cups-filters, Ghostscript, and other 
components works on RISC-V. This is thanks to the portable way of coding applied 
by most open-source developers, especially also the developers working on said 
components of the printing stack.

So distros which publish a RISC-V version contain a working printing stack and 
driverless IPP printers (practically all modern ones are, AirPrint, Mopria, IPP 
Everywhere) just work with them. Also there are many open-source printer drivers 
for many legacy and specialty printers of the last 30 or 40 years, and distros 
usually include many of those.

I by myself have tested the printing stack on RISC-V, running Ubuntu on the 
first DC ROMA mainboard for Framework laptops a year ago and everything built 
and worked for me, both with standard Debian packages and with Snap packages:

https://openprinting.github.io/OpenPrinting-News-We-got-a-Framework-RISC-V-board-from-DeepComputing/

With this I know that printing with my driverless IPP printer just works as it 
does with an x86 client, but for all the old printer drivers I only know that 
they build on RISC-V. As I do not have all these printers and as many of the 
drivers are written by hobby programmers who just wanted to get their printer to 
work and perhaps did not make their code that portable (at least I did not see 
many complaints from users of non-x86 architectures, like ARM or so) I am not 
sure whether all of them will actually work correctly on RISC-V.

I was responsible for the Ubuntu packaging of the printing stack in that time 
and when testing on RISC-V I did not modify or fix any of the packages for 
RISC-V issues. They all just worked (or at least built in case of legacy printer 
drivers). I only needed to activate RISC-V builds for our Snaps in the Snap Store.

What is really a problem are printers which need proprietary drivers, as those 
drivers are closed source only available for x86. Here one would need to run an 
x86 emulator. This approach is already made use of. We have a contributor at 
OpenPrinting who sells ARM-based SBCs to turn legacy printers into driverless 
IPP printers and he does not only install all open-source drivers on them but 
also an x86 emulation framework to allow running proprietary drivers.

Fortunately these printers which need proprietary drivers are rather rare nowadays.

    Till