Many or most packages don't have good cross-build infrastructure. That's important when you're a Fedora or Ubuntu building 50k+ random packages, not just working on GCC / LLVM / Linux Kernel all the time.
Doing "native" build in an emulator works for just about everything, but with a 10x - 15x slowdown compared to native or cross-build.
While price/performance of RISC-V is currently significantly worse than x86, it's not 10x worse.
A $2500 Milk-V Pioneer (64 cores, 128 GB RAM) builds a RISC-V Linux kernel five times faster than a $1500 x86 laptop (24 cores) using RISC-V docker/qemu.
A $75 VisionFive 2 or BPI-F3 takes 3 times longer than the x86 with qemu but costs 20 times less.
If you're only building one thing at a time and already have the fast x86 ... then, sure, use that. But if you want a build farm then RISC-V native on either the Pioneer or the VF2 is already much better.
These P550 machines are an incremental improvement again, in price/performance.
Doing "native" build in an emulator works for just about everything, but with a 10x - 15x slowdown compared to native or cross-build.
While price/performance of RISC-V is currently significantly worse than x86, it's not 10x worse.
A $2500 Milk-V Pioneer (64 cores, 128 GB RAM) builds a RISC-V Linux kernel five times faster than a $1500 x86 laptop (24 cores) using RISC-V docker/qemu.
A $75 VisionFive 2 or BPI-F3 takes 3 times longer than the x86 with qemu but costs 20 times less.
If you're only building one thing at a time and already have the fast x86 ... then, sure, use that. But if you want a build farm then RISC-V native on either the Pioneer or the VF2 is already much better.
These P550 machines are an incremental improvement again, in price/performance.
For more numbers see:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395796