Amazon Adds RISC-V Support To FreeRTOS

Amazon AWS has added support for the RISC-V open-source processor architecture to their FreeRTOS kernel.

Amazon has maintained their own version of FreeRTOS, the MIT-licensed real-time operating system designed for embedded devices that works with dozens of micro-controller platforms, where they have supported OTA updates, WiFi, Bluetooth LE, and other features. The latest feature addition to Amazon FreeRTOS is RISC-V support.

Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services announced today they have brought RISC-V (both RV32I and RV64I versions) to FreeRTOS while talking up this royalty-free processor ISA in the process. This enablement includes support for the QEMU emulator for the SiFive HiFive board, Renode emulator, and OpenISA VEGAboard.

More details via the AWS blog. More details on the Amazon FreeRTOS efforts via GitHub and aws.amazon.com.

It will certainly be interesting to see what Amazon does with RISC-V moving forward... Especially if they end up spinning their own RISC-V chips like they have begun doing with 64-bit ARM and their Graviton CPUs. It will be really interesting if in the future they offer RISC-V access via the EC2 cloud for lower-cost access to enable greater RISC-V software development by the masses. It's certainly tantalizing as well to see the growing number of organizations large and small getting behind RISC-V.