Introduction

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.