Open Source Summit Europe 2024

With its global uptake, the RISC-V specifications and RISC-V International, as the standards-development body, are facing an unprecedented challenges: the international adoption of RISC-V as an alternative, open-standards ISA and its role in various digital sovereignty initiatives worldwide are putting a geopolitical spotlight on the the standards and specifications released by RISC-V International. Safeguarding the protected status as a standards-development body and ensuring ongoing, constructive collaboration between geographies in the setting of future standards, requires a focus on policies and processes in our standards-development process. This session compares the existing RISC-V specification development with the ISO processes, and provides an outlook to some of the process improvements underway that will lead to an even closer alignment: the ultimate goal being a path to publication of the publicly available RISC-V specifications as international standards. We will provide an overview of the role of the RISC-V Technical Steering Committee, into the quality-gates a proposed standard must pass, and the consensus-building processes within each specification group.