Background

RISC-V is a lot of things to a lot of different entities, but the focus tends to be on a specific few: RISC-V International was formed by the founding member companies to steward the specification development and advancement of the ISA as well advance the commercial interest of RISC-V. This was done by creating a commercial trade organization and thus has an unfortunate side effect: RISC-V International is structurally bound to focus on commercial success. But an ecosystem that only worries about commercial success isn’t any different than any other proprietary ISA. A successful ecosystem isn’t just an ISA, an implementation, or the software. It’s a combination of all of those and making a user experience beyond that. But let’s talk about the software of RISC-V for a moment. RISC-V International has very limited resources, so several members banded together to create RISE, the RISC-V Software Ecosystem Project, to help with this. But sadly, it’s also commercial only and doesn’t (at time of writing) allow individuals to participate.

This situation puts the larger community in a bit of a bind. We want RISC-V to achieve it’s goal of being the ISA for the next 50 years, but commercial interests are only interested in profits in the short term (and typically only for their own products). The result of this is most US/EU based companies are focused on high end fabless IP offerings for maximum profit. There are some exceptions to this (shout out to OpenHW Group, PULP, and others for making open implementations available), but mostly it means the larger community are left with implementations coming out of China. To be clear: I’m not saying is not a bad thing, but the limited options are extremely frustrating. China and the EU have decided to dramatically reduce their dependence on US based technology, and are making heavy investments in RISC-V because of that. The amount of government investment in making RISC-V the future from China is downright astounding. Their RV2036 initiative is putting strategic investments in every level of the ecosystem there: universities, IP vendors, system integrators, and foundries. To wit, I can’t understate how much work the students of several major universities have done for the greater ecosystem in the form of porting exiting projects to RISC-V for the Fedora and Debian projects. The US on the other hand has several companies working on server IP that won’t be accessible to large swaths of the market, except maybe as VMs in a cloud provider.

Next Steps

This isn’t meant to be a gripe fest, but is intended to provide context that compelled me to create Works with RISC-V. RISC-V International and RISE are member-only organizations with contractual requirements that the larger community can’t always agree to. On top of that, those contractual requirements create barriers to entry for Open Source contributors wanting to engage with the ecosystem, mostly related to export controls and sanctions. Works with RISC-V isn’t immune to those, but it dramatically reduces what we need to comply with. Since everything we do is out in the open, we don’t need to collect personal information to ensure compliance with most of the regulations. However, since myself and several other organizers are in the US, and many of our services/servers are based in the US, there are still some regulations we need to comply with. Where we differ is by being open first, open only. We also don’t have contractual requirements around working with competitors, so we are free to speak, compare, and contrast different implementations and products. We can also do work that the commercial vendors see as “un-important” or “not valuable”, as well as choose not to promote what initiatives commercial vendors consider “valuable” but only serve their short-term interests and not the wider community.

I’m just getting started with this organization. We have this site/blog, the wiki, and a Discord server running now. We’re going to start having on-line meetings once a month with a hangout component, show and tell, and news and reviews. I’m working on a vendor agnostic forum to share information about the entire ecosystem that is web searchable (unlike the Discord and on-line meetings). I’m also working on opening some on-line video content (combined with blog posts) starting in 2026 around various topics: software porting, FPGA implementations, and more. We also want to make resources and documentation for the benefit of the community: a Vector introduction and getting started guide, board bring-up and custom distro guides, the RVDEV CONEX, and more.

Welcome

To borrow some great words from the wonderful folks at Illumos Cafe: Works with RISC-V is your place for everything related to RISC-V. It’s more than a collection of services; it’s a warm, volunteer-run space for conversation, learning, and community. We keep things pro, not against. Our approach is collaborative and constructive: we build, we share, and we welcome everyone. Looking for boards? Need cloud resources? Can’t figure out how to cross-compile? Want to run emulators and are having problems? We’re here to help with all of that, and hopefully make it easier for everyone to jump in. Welcome, we’re glad you’re here.

Header Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Special Thank You to Ryan S and Robert P for editing and feedback on this post.