RISC-V Support Continues Maturing Within The Mainline Linux Kernel

The initial RISC-V architecture support landed in Linux 4.15 and now this open-source, royalty-free processor ISA is seeing further improvements with the Linux 4.17 cycle.

Improvements for RISC-V with the newly in-development Linux 4.17 kernel include support for dynamic ftrace, clean-ups to their atomic and locking code, module loading support is now enabled by default, and other fixes.

The complete list of RISC-V patches for Linux 4.17 can be found via today's pull request.

In other RISC-V news, company SiFive Inc that has been working on RISC-V hardware including a developer board just announced they raised $50 million USD in additional funding via a Series C round. A Phoronix reader also tipped us off that the Samsung Exynos 9820's reportedly is making some use of RISC-V internally as well -- we've known for two years now Samsung wants to eventually start rolling RISC-V cores. All in all, it will be interesting to see what more comes of RISC-V this calendar year.