RISC-V International and the RISE Project are teaming up to participate in the Yocto Project. RISC-V International has upgraded from Silver to a Platinum membership and will participate with governance at the board level, and the RISE Project will pitch in with engineering support.
Embedded Linux engineers are well acquainted with the Yocto Project, which emerged in 2010 as an enterprise-quality build system for customized Linux distributions. Since then, it has become a de facto standard for building Linux-based embedded systems, and forms the basis for other successful projects such as Automotive Grade Linux. The Yocto Project has supported RISC-V platforms unofficially for several years through community-maintained layers and contributions, but until now there has not been formal support for RISC-V.
This is not the first time RISC-V and RISE have worked together, but it is a notable collaboration, as the Yocto Project is a key infrastructure project with a reach far beyond embedded systems. YP maintains a large build and test matrix that covers a great many individual platforms – a necessity given the nature of embedded systems. This translates to testing coverage for a great many corner cases that could be missed by platform-specific tests. This strengthens the entire Linux ecosystem. Further, official Yocto Project support means that RISC-V members who develop and market embedded platforms will now have fully verified support for tools to build Linux on those platforms, giving them the opportunity to engage with upstream projects directly and to be on a level playing field with other hardware architectures. All RISC-V profiles, including RVA23 will be supported, and the Yocto Project provides a 4 year Long Term Support (LTS) cycle to enable device manufacturers with a platform to build upon and leverage to provide crucial features such as Software Bill of Material (SBOM) generation and state of the art build reproducibility.
This also fits very well with the charter for the RISE Project, which itself is a collaboration among 20+ companies to provide engineering and financial resources toward the development and maintenance of the software ecosystem for RISC-V. RISE has over €1m dedicated to projects across this ecosystem and acts as a force-multiplier to enable software and tools at every level of the stack, from base firmware to AI/ML applications as well as Linux and other OS integration. RISE is made up exclusively of RISC-V members and the two projects work together continuously.
Through collaboration with the Yocto Project, RISC-V International and RISE provide a new pathway for RISC-V to continue blazing a trail into the future of computing platforms.