RISE Launches RISC-V GitHub Runners, Providing CI and Build Services Free to Open Source Projects

The RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) project, under the auspice of the Linux Foundation, has announced the availability of free GitHub Runners for software developers targeting the free and open source instruction set — available at no cost to any open source projects to use for continuous integration (CI).

"Today, we are excited to announce the Early Availability of the RISE RISC-V Runners, a free, managed GitHub Actions runner service that gives any open source project access to real RISC-V hardware in their CI pipelines," says RISE's Ludovic Henry of the new offering. "No emulation, no cross-compilation hacks, no waitlist. Install a GitHub App, change one line in your workflow, and your jobs run on physical RISC-V boards."

Originally launched in its earliest public incarnation in 2014, after four years of development at the University of California, Berkeley, RISC-V is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) made available under a permissive, open license. As a result, anyone can develop their own hardware — whether as a proprietary product, as with SiFive's processor core IP, or as an open hardware project like Luke Wren's Hazard3 cores in the Raspberry Pi RP2350 family of microcontrollers.

Being able to develop hardware is one thing, but it's not much use without compatible software. A commonly-cited reason for developers not to target RISC-V devices is the scarcity of performant hardware on which to build and test it — with the readily-available low-cost devices performing poorly and high-performance devices being priced out of the reach of many volunteer-driven open source projects.

That's where RISE, founded to help grow the RISC-V software ecosystem, comes in. "Until now, most open source projects that wanted to test on RISC-V hardware had to source their own boards, manage their own infrastructure, or rely on limited and oversubscribed shared resources," Henry explains. "That's a lot to ask of a maintainer who just wants to know if their library builds and passes tests on riscv64. The RISE RISC-V Runners remove that barrier entirely. As part of the RISE Project’s mission to accelerate the RISC-V software ecosystem, we are providing this service free of charge to any open source project on GitHub."

More information on the service is available in the RISE documentation; at the time of writing, it was made available exclusively via Microsoft's GitHub platform — meaning projects hosted elsewhere would have to move to, or at least mirror to, GitHub to use it.