The RISC-V Foundation and the Linux Foundation have announced a joint initiative which they claim will “enable a new era of open architecture” and “accelerate open source development and adoption of the RISC-V ISA [Instruction Set Architecture].”

“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,” explains Rick O’Connor, executive director of the non-profit RISC-V Foundation’s decision to partner with the Linux 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 early traction in a number of markets with applications for AI [Artificial Intelligence], machine learning, IoT [Internet of Things], augmented reality, cloud, data centres, semiconductors, networking and more. RISC-V is a technology that has the potential to greatly advance open hardware architecture,” adds 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.”

The partnership will see the Linux Foundation providing neutral governance and best practices for open source development alongside resources including but not limited to training programmes, infrastructure tools, community outreach, marketing, and legal expertise.

The two organisations are already collaborating on the first of these resources, a pair of “getting started” guides for the open-source RISC-V-compatible Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS) which will be formally unveiled during the RISC-V Summit event on the 3rd of December.