While the OpenRISC project began ten years before RISC-V was started, it hasn't enjoyed the hardware ecosystem successes of the latter but still the upstream Linux kernel support continues moving forward and the ability to run OpenRISC on FPGA developer boards.

For Linux 7.0 the OpenRISC code has been working to improve the OpenRISC kernel support out-of-the-box on more FPGA developer boards.

Most notably is OpenRISC now having a mainline Device Tree configuration for running on the DE0 Nano FPGA developer kit in both single and multi-core configurations.

The DE0 Nano board is a compact FPGA development platform designed for prototyping and retails for just over $100 USD. The DE0 Nano with the Altera Cyclone IV EP4CE22F17C6N FPGA has 22,320 logic elements, 594 Kbits embedded memory, 4 general purpose PLLs, and 153 FPGA I/O pins. There is 32MB of SDRAM on this small FPGA developer board.

The OpenRISC code for Linux 7.0 has also fixed a bug in the OpenRISC SMP kernel code preventing it from running on FPGA developer boards. There is also a fix for build failures on OpenRISC for drivers using the nop() macro.

These OpenRISC changes were merged for Linux 7.0.