The x86 and ARM ecosystems carry decades of legacy components. Examples are the Intel Management Engine, closed firmware binaries, and old downstream kernels in the case of ARM. ARM in particular does not have a common standard for boot and hardware description. Because of this, mainline Linux supports only expensive ARM server hardware in most cases.

RISC-V is an open instruction set and a real alternative in 2026. RVA23 chips approach the performance of current Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. Virtualization now works correctly, and vendors put SoC support into mainline Linux before they ship the hardware. Even current Fedora now runs on this hardware without modification.

These changes make a new type of bare-metal cluster possible. You own more of your stack because the boot firmware and the chip designs are open. No licenses or patents block you, and in theory you can even manufacture the chips yourself. A Kubernetes cluster on RISC-V with immutable Linux, built with bootc and composefs or with systemd-sysupdate, needs almost no maintenance and has no legacy components.

The session includes a live demo of such a cluster, which is based on one Milk-V Jupiter 1 board with an RVA22 chip and one Milk-V Jupiter 2 board with an RVA23 chip. We install a full open-source analytics stack on the cluster, with ClickHouse as the core. The demo shows that immutable images make upgrades and rollbacks simple and safe, and what RISC-V bare metal can do in 2026 and beyond.