The RISC-V Foundation includes over 210 institutional, academic and individual members and this partnership with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to grow the RISC-V ecosystem with improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms.
“With the rapid international adoption of the RISC-V ISA, we need increased scale and resources to support the explosive growth of the RISC-V ecosystem. The Linux Foundation is an ideal partner given the open source nature of both organisations,” explained Rick O’Connor, executive director of the non-profit RISC-V Foundation. “This joint collaboration will enable the RISC-V Foundation to offer more robust support and educational tools for the active RISC-V community, and enable operating systems, hardware implementations and development tools to scale faster.”
“RISC-V has great traction in a number of markets with applications for AI, machine learning, IoT, augmented reality, cloud, data centres, semiconductors, networking and more. RISC-V is a technology that has the potential to greatly advance open hardware architecture,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation. “We look forward to collaborating with the RISC-V Foundation to advance RISC-V ISA adoption and build a strong ecosystem globally.”
Since its inception in 2015, RISC-V has evolved its ecosystem to feature leading technology companies and emerging start-ups all working together to enable a wide range of open-source and proprietary RISC-V hardware and software solutions. Members are solving some of today’s most complex design challenges including security, performance, power, efficiency, flexibility and more.
In addition to neutral governance and best practices for open source development, The Linux Foundation will also provide an influx of resources for the RISC-V ecosystem, such as training programs, infrastructure tools, as well as community outreach, marketing and legal expertise.
The RISC-V ISA offers a number of advantages, including its openness, simplicity, clean-slate design, modularity, extensibility and stability, delivering a new level of software and hardware freedom on architecture.
The Linux Foundation and the RISC-V communities are already collaborating on a pair of “Getting Started” guides for running the Zephyr, a small, scalable open source RTOS for connected, resource constrained devices, and Linux operating systems on RISC-V based platforms.
