RISE project gives RISC-V an open source software lift

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RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) project brings together key players in the ecosystem with a governing board that includes Andes, Google, Intel, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm Technologies, Red Hat, Rivos, Samsung, SiFive, T-Head, and Ventana.

www.embedded.com/, Jun. 02, 2023 – 

Hardware needs software and it needs a good ecosystem to help proliferate deployment and serve different applications. To address this, the Linux Foundation Europe has launched a new global collaborative effort to accelerate the availability of software for high-performance and power-efficient RISC-V cores running high level operating systems for a variety of market segments.

Called the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) project, it brings together key players in the ecosystem with a governing board that includes Andes, Google, Intel, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm Technologies, Red Hat, Rivos, Samsung, SiFive, T-Head, and Ventana. The chair of the RISE Project, Amber Huffman, said, "The RISE Project brings together leaders with a shared sense of urgency to accelerate the RISC-V software ecosystem readiness in collaboration with RISC-V International."

RISE project members will contribute financially and provide engineering talent to address specific software deliverables prioritized by the RISE technical steering committee (TSC). RISE is dedicated to enabling a robust software ecosystem specifically for application processors that includes software development tools, virtualization support, language runtimes, Linux distribution integration, and system firmware, working upstream first with existing open-source communities in accordance with open source best practices.

One of the biggest challenges the RISC-V story has is the continual perception that it's the new challenger to existing architectures, and so it is not quite there yet in terms of ecosystem and support. The announcement of the RISE project is therefore quite timely as one of the key messages we've been hearing at this year's Computex 2023 in Taiwan is the significance of ecosystems and software – whatever system development you are doing, with whatever architecture you are using, partner and support ecosystems are important.

For example, Nvidia's CEO and founder Jensen Huang highlighted this in his keynote speech at the show, illustrating the huge ecosystem of software ecosystem and libraries. Arm's senior vice-president and general manager for the infrastructure business, Mohamed Awad talked about the software ecosystem on Arm with around 15 million developers working specifically on Arm v9. In a briefing, he told us, "Arm enables the ecosystem to innovate, we focus very much on software enablement, working with the open source community, such as Linaro."

Steve Leibson, analyst at Tirias Research, told our sister publication EE Times, "The RISC-V movement has suffered from the same malaise that has afflicted countless earlier processor architectures for half a century: the hardware is willing, but the software is weak. One of the aspects of microprocessor leadership that Arm has gotten right over the past three decades is the construction of a massive ecosystem. Arm is rightfully proud of its ecosystem and the company has estimated that the ecosystem cuts project development costs for Arm-based projects by 50 percent. That's not an unbelievable number. With a large ecosystem, chances are good that someone, somewhere has already trod the technical paths a development team needs to travel to reach a project destination successfully. In short, a large ecosystem helps to reduce project risks, and Arm's ecosystem is quite large."

Linux Foundation Europe's general manager, Gabriele Columbro, said, "The RISE Project is dedicated to enabling RISC-V in open source tools and libraries (such as LLVM, GCC) to speed implementation and time-to-market. RISC-V is a cornerstone of the European technology and industrial landscape, so we're honored to provide a neutral, trusted home for the RISE Project under Linux Foundation Europe."

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