The Python ecosystem just reached a landmark milestone: CPython now officially supports RISC-V as a Tier 3 platform. This is the result of months of dedicated community work, and RISE is proud to have played a central role in getting here.
Read the full announcement on the Python Insider blog.
A Milestone Years in the Making
RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture whose ecosystem is projected to quadruple by 2032. As RISC-V hardware moves from research labs to data centers, cloud infrastructure, and consumer devices, it is increasingly critical that the software world keeps pace.
Getting CPython to officially recognize RISC-V required sustained effort: testing on real hardware, hunting down architecture-specific bugs, improving build support, and shepherding patches through review. That work is now recognized in PEP 11.
Thank You, Stan Ulbrych
The driving force behind this achievement is Stan Ulbrych. Stan authored the CPython changes, coordinated the community effort, and wrote the official announcement. We owe him an enormous thank you: this milestone simply would not have happened without his persistence and skill.
Stan was also supported by the Sovereign Tech Agency‘s fellowship program, and benefited from the broader community contributions of Furkan Onder, Emma Smith, and many others.
RISE’s Contributions
RISE’s involvement went beyond cheerleading. Here is what the project contributed to making this happen:
Real RISC-V hardware for CPython CI. One of the hard requirements for Tier 3 status is ongoing, reliable testing. RISE provided several physical RISC-V machines to the CPython project, enabling buildbot coverage and giving Stan and other contributors a way to reproduce and debug architecture-specific failures on real hardware rather than emulation.
RISE RISC-V Runners. Looking ahead, RISE is working with the CPython team to bring RISC-V into CPython’s own CI pipeline through RISE RISC-V Runners. This service provides free, ephemeral RISC-V GitHub Actions runners backed by physical hardware for open-source projects, giving contributors faster feedback before code is even merged, rather than waiting for post-merge buildbot results.
Wheels and the broader Python ecosystem. Making CPython work on RISC-V is necessary, but not sufficient. Python’s value comes from its ecosystem, and that means ensuring the thousands of packages people rely on are also available as prebuilt wheels for RISC-V. RISE has been tackling this on multiple fronts:
- pypi.riseproject.dev – A supplementary package index where RISC-V wheels are published while upstream projects are still adding official support. Users can install packages from this index today without waiting for PyPI.
- RISC-V Wheels Dashboard – A dashboard maintained by Stan that tracks the top 15,000 most-downloaded Python packages and their RISC-V wheel availability. It shows at a glance which packages have wheels on PyPI, which are available on the RISE index, and which still need work.
- python-wheels upstream contributions – A project where RISE tracks and drives contributions to upstream packages to land native RISC-V wheel support directly on PyPI. Progress is visible on the RISE Python Wheels project board.
What Comes Next
Tier 3 is a beginning, not an end. The Python project has set its sights on Tier 2, which requires deeper CI integration and broader coverage. RISE will continue providing infrastructure and contributing upstream to help Python – and its ecosystem – treat RISC-V as a first-class platform.
If you maintain a Python package with native extensions and want to add RISC-V support, the RISE team is here to help. Check the wheels dashboard to see where your package stands, explore pypi.riseproject.dev for interim wheel availability, or reach out through github.com/riseproject-dev/python-wheels.
And if you have access to RISC-V hardware, try running Python on it – and report what you find. Every bug report moves the platform forward.
Congratulations to Stan, to the CPython core team, and to everyone who contributed. This is a great day for RISC-V and for Python. 🎉
