Virtual Environment and Tool-Boxing for Trustworthy Development of RISC-V Processor based Cloud Services (Vitamin-V)

Vitamin-V provides a complete hardware-software stack for cloud services based on RISC-V

The Horizon Europe Vitamin-V research project aims to deploy an hardware-software stack based on cutting-edge open source technologies for the RISC-V architecture within the European Processor Initiative (EPI). The virtual execution environment provided within the project unlocks software development, verification and validation while refining the actual availability of the RISC-V cloud processor.

Such a virtual execution environment is based on three pillars: functional emulation (QEMU), cycle-accurate simulation (gem5) and hardware prototyping (FPGA); these technologies are all required to fulfill the needs of a complete development cycle of cloud services. In addition, cross-compiling toolchains and frameworks as well as open-source cloud software distributions will be ported to the emerging RISC-V architecture. Vitamin-V will demonstrate the fully deployed software stack for cloud Data Analytics and Serverless workloads on three flavors of the VRISC-V virtual execution environment: classic, modern and serverless.

Virtual Open Systems supports the development activities around open-source virtualization technologies like KVM, QEMU and rust-vmm. In addition VOSySmonitoRV, a system partitioner for the RISC-V architecture which is inspired by VOSySmonitor, will be brought from its conceptual state to a working prototype. But there's more, in the context of the project, Virtual Open Systems will also contribute to the rust-vmm project to add RISC-V support; this work is planned to be exploited through extensions of the VOSySzator company product to target the project's cloud usage scenarios.