The Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation announce collaboration

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source and the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. At the same time the RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) Foundation is a non-profit corporation controlled by its members to drive the adoption and implementation of the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Born in academia and research, RISC-V ISA delivers a new level of free, extensible software and hardware freedom on architecture, paving the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation. Both Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation announced a joint collaboration agreement to accelerate open source development and adoption of the RISC-V ISA.

The RISC-V Foundation includes over 210 institutional, academic and individual members from around the world and has realized 100 percent year-over-year membership growth. 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 organizations,” said Rick O’Connor, executive director of the non-profit RISC-V Foundation.  “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.”

“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,” 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 quickly evolved its ecosystem to feature leading technology companies and emerging startups 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 over other architectures, 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. The Zephyr and Linux guides will be unveiled at the RISC-V Summit on Dec. 3, 2018, in Santa Clara during training classes led by project contributors from RISC-V Foundation Founding Platinum Members Antmicro, Google, Microchip Technology and Western Digital, in addition to the Linux Foundation.