What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical

Summary

Interest in RISC-V has grown rapidly over the last few years. While many use cases have been deeply embedded, during 2026 we expect to see a rapid increase in the number of chips and boards available to developers that support Linux. In this blog I will look at some of the drivers for this growth, the value proposition of RISC-V and explain why supporting RISC-V is important to Canonical. What is RISC-V? RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA). An ISA describes the set of instructions that a CPU executes to run a program. Other examples of modern ISAs include Armv8-A or Intel x86_64. RISC-V was created in 2010, and RISC-V International was founded in 2015 to act as a steward for the specification(s). These are developed through community engagement with industry, academia, and even enthusiastic individuals. As an open standard, anyone can create a RISC-V CPU. As a specification it provides foundational technology standards, while allowing innovation both through extensions to the ISA, and also in terms of business models. It is not an implementation of a CPU, but an architecture specification like USB or Ethernet. Today, RISC-V is widely used and shipping in volume. Most uses of RISC-V have been deeply embedded – which means they are tied to the product they are part of and not available to individual developers, but that situation is changing and improving. During 2026 we expect to see multiple vendors with development boards supporting the RVA23 profile that can run Linux. There are many reasons to consider using RISC-V, from the philosophy of adopting an open standard architecture, to concerns over technology sovereignty. There are also fundamental business and technology drivers which I will explain in more detail. Enabling new business models As a permissively licensed ISA, RISC-V offers the ultimate flexibility for businesses and the open source community. Implementations of RISC-V can be open source, closed source, licensed as IP, or dev...