Open Challenges for a Production-ready Cloud Environment on top of RISC-V hardware

Abstract

This article, stemming from the Vitamin-V European project, investigates the necessary steps to create a functional, production-ready cloud environment leveraging RISC-V hardware. The authors describe the creation of a prototype RISC-V cluster managed by OpenStack and detail the resulting hardware and software integration challenges. Crucially, the work identifies significant performance gaps that must be addressed to achieve a viable cloud environment and secure European technological sovereignty.

Report

Key Highlights

• Project Context: The work is part of the Vitamin-V European project, focused on advanced RISC-V ecosystem development.
• Primary Goal: To realize and demonstrate a functional, production-ready cloud ecosystem based entirely on RISC-V hardware.
• Methodology: Implementation of a prototype RISC-V cluster managed by the standard cloud orchestration platform, OpenStack.
• Findings: The paper primarily explains the hardware and software difficulties encountered while porting essential OpenStack elements to the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).
• Strategic Imperative: The success of this effort is explicitly linked to achieving European technological sovereignty.

Technical Details

• Target Architecture: RISC-V hardware (new ISA).
• Cloud Orchestration: OpenStack is utilized as the cluster management software.
• Technical Focus Areas: The paper investigates challenges related to software porting (specifically OpenStack elements) and underlying hardware performance.
• Identified Issues: The central focus is on "performance gaps" that currently prohibit the creation of a commercially viable, production-ready cloud environment.

Implications

• RISC-V Maturity: This study signifies the shift in RISC-V development from academic prototypes toward serious, production-grade infrastructure, specifically large-scale cloud computing.
• Ecosystem Development Roadmap: By detailing specific porting issues and performance deficiencies in the OpenStack environment, the authors provide a crucial roadmap for the software and hardware communities to focus their development efforts.
• Cloud Adoption Barrier Analysis: The research highlights that while RISC-V hardware exists, the associated software ecosystem (like major cloud frameworks) requires significant effort to achieve functional equivalence and performance parity with established architectures.
• Geopolitical Significance: The connection made between RISC-V cloud deployment and "European technological sovereignty" reinforces the strategic, non-commercial drivers behind investing in open instruction set architectures for critical infrastructure.