The RISC-V eco-system makes big strides to reach feature parity with other instructions set architectures.
RISC-V being an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) all the standardization work happens in the open, organized in working groups of RISC-V International. All corporate members (like Canonical) and individual members (membership is free) can contribute.
The diagram below shows the top level specifications that will define the RISC-V server platform.
The Server SoC Specification focuses on hardware requirements: clocks, timers, IOMMU, PCIe subsystem, Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability, Quality of Service, Manageability, Performance Monitoring, Security Requirements.
The Boot and Runtime Services (BRS) Specification defines firmware requirements. For Ubuntu the BRS-I recipe is relevant. It defines requirements for: ACPI, SMBIOS, UEFI, supervisor binary interface (services provided by firmware to the kernel).
The RISC-V Profile Specification defines collections of instruction set extensions. Our current Ubuntu distribution runs on RVA20 hardware. RVA22 adds features like hypervisor support and vector instructions. RVA23 will make these mandatory and add vector crypto, pointer masking and more. RVA22 hardware is expected to reach the market in 2024, RVA23 in 2025 or 2026.
The Server Platform Specification refers to the three specification and adds further server specific requirements like secure boot.
For Ubuntu it is important that we review and comment on the upcoming specifications before they are finalized. Please, have a look at the links below.
Links
Specifications
- RISC-V Server SoC specification
- RISC-V Boot and Runtime Services (BRS) Specification
- RVA20 and RVA22 Profiles, RVA23 Profile
- RISC-V Server Platform and Server Platform Test specifications
Mailing lists