This page describes the history of the FreeBSD/RISC-V port, an adaptation of the FreeBSD Operating System to run on the RISC-V Instruction-Set Architecture (ISA). As a result of this work, FreeBSD is able to boot to multi-user mode on the Spike simulator and QEMU emulator. Following a number of commits to the FreeBSD subversion repository in January 2016 (see below), FreeBSD was the first operating system to have bootable in-tree support for RISC-V. This work was described in an EE Times article on the January 2016 RISC-V workshop. This work was supported by the DARPA CTSRD Project at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and was led by RuslanBukin.

The FreeBSD Foundation posted a blog article describing the RISC-V porting effort and merge of architectural support to the FreeBSD base system in January 2016.

This page contains some details about the FreeBSD/riscv64 development process. Now that RISC-V is an in-tree supported architecture this information is largely kept here for historical purposes.

Delivery into head:

Work on this project was performed by RuslanBukin, ArunThomas, and EdMaste, with RobertWatson, AndrewTurner, DavidChisnall, and others providing advice and moral support.