ERICI Reference Stack Breaks RISC-V Industrial Adoption Deadlock

Industrial computers have long relied on x86 and ARM instruction sets, each controlled by a single vendor, creating technology lock-in and long-term dependency risks for systems expected to operate for 15 years or longer. RISC-V offers an open alternative governed by a nonprofit entity. The RVA23 profile, finalized in October 2024, made industrial-grade capabilities—hypervisor extensions and vector operations—mandatory, and compatible silicon has begun shipping. Yet adoption remains stalled: hardware makers await software support while developers lack accessible platforms for implementation.

ERICI addresses this circular dependency by defining and deploying an open reference stack that runs immediately on available RVA23 silicon. The stack spans firmware, bootloader, hypervisor, and dual-partition operating systems, with a partitioning hypervisor enabling real-time control and general-purpose Linux to run simultaneously on the same processor with complete resource isolation. All components are open source under GPL and Apache licenses, ensuring auditability and long-term maintainability. The layered design with clean public interfaces—UEFI, kernel contracts, device trees—keeps implementations portable across different RVA23 chips and vendors.

Operating as a nonprofit effort, ERICI recruits hardware makers, silicon vendors, operators, OS developers, and researchers worldwide. Membership requires concrete contributions—functioning RVA23 systems with complete specifications—rather than abstract roadmaps. By establishing this working reference implementation now, the initiative aims to prove RISC-V’s viability for industrial computing and create a genuine vendor-independent ecosystem.