The Linux and RISC-V foundations team up to drive open source development and adoption of RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA)

Yesterday, the Linux Foundation announced that they are joining hands with the RISC-V Foundation to drive the open source development and adoption of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).

https://twitter.com/risc_v/status/1067553703685750785

The RISC-V Foundation is a non-profit corporation, which is responsible for directing the future development of the RISC-V ISA. Since its formation, the RISC-V Foundation has quickly grown and now includes more than 100 member organizations.

With this collaboration, the foundations aim to further grow this RISC-V ecosystem and provide improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms. Rick O’Connor, the executive director of the RISC-V Foundation, said, “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 organizations. This joint collaboration with the Linux Foundation 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.”

The Linux Foundation will provide governance, best practices for open source development, and resources such as training programs and infrastructure tools. Along with this, they will also help RISC-V in community outreach, marketing, and legal expertise.

Jim Zemlin, the executive director at the Linux Foundation believes that RISC-V has great potential seeing its popularity in areas like AI, machine learning, IoT, and more. He said, “RISC-V has great traction in a number of markets with applications for AI, machine learning, IoT, augmented reality, cloud, data centers, semiconductors, networking and more. RISC-V is a technology that has the potential to greatly advance open hardware architecture. We look forward to collaborating with the RISC-V Foundation to advance RISC-V ISA adoption and build a strong ecosystem globally.”

The two foundations have already started working on a pair of getting started guides for running Zephyr, a small, scalable open source real-time operating system (RTOS) optimized for resource-constrained devices. They are also conducting RISC-V Summit, a 4-day event starting from December 3-6 in Santa Clara. This summit will include sessions on RISC-V ISA architecture, commercial and open-source implementations, software and silicon, vectors and security, applications and accelerators, and much more.

Read the complete announcement on the Linux Foundation’s official website.