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How Kairos is Charting the Stepping Stones of RISC-V Productization

By September 28, 2026No Comments

by Ashleigh Bustamente, Google

Bringing an instruction set architecture into the commercial mainstream requires more than silicon innovation. It demands a robust, production-ready software stack. When software projects set out to support a new architecture, access to developer tooling, upstream toolchains, and continuous integration infrastructure makes the difference between experimental prototypes and production software.

An example of this ecosystem in action is Kairos, the CNCF sandbox project delivering immutable Linux meta-distributions for edge Kubernetes.

By leveraging the RISE RISC-V Runners—a free, managed GitHub Actions runner service providing access to native RISC-V hardware—Kairos maintainers have integrated continuous native validation directly into core repositories like kairos-init and hadron. Building upon this foundation, Kairos maintainer Mauro Morales recently published an open invitation to test Kairos on riscv64.

This milestone highlights what open collaboration enables and provides a clear blueprint for the stepping stones required to bring a software product to market on RISC-V.

The Stepping Stones of RISC-V Productization

Taking software from initial architecture exploration to enterprise-ready edge deployments follows a defined lifecycle. The journey Kairos is navigating illustrates the essential stages of architecture enablement:

  1. Upstream Base: Upstream distributions such as Ubuntu 24.04 riscv64 and Hadron establish baseline glibc, compiler, and kernel support.
  2. Native CI and Emulation: Validating builds on native hardware via RISE RISC-V Runners while utilizing QEMU for virtual prototyping and early CI pipelines.
  3. Community Integration: Leveraging specialized community builds, such as CARV-ICS-FORTH’s riscv64 k3s fork, to prototype and test complete runtime stacks before official upstream releases exist.
  4. Bare-Metal Testing: Moving out of virtual machines to validate physical bootloaders, peripherals, storage timings, and memory maps on real silicon.
                  🎉This is the active milestone Kairos has reached🎉
  5. Mainline Upstreaming: Coordinating with upstream maintainers to achieve official multi-architecture releases in core projects like k3s and k0s.
  6. Production Delivery: Delivering zero-touch provisioning, immutable A/B rollbacks, and enterprise commercial support across certified RISC-V edge appliances.

Spotlight: What Kairos Achieved on riscv64

Kairos transforms standard Linux distributions into immutable, container-based operating systems tailored for Kubernetes at the edge. Combining Kairos’s declarative, self-updating architecture with open, vendor-neutral RISC-V hardware establishes a strong foundation for IoT gateways, telecommunications, and industrial automation.

Key technical achievements to date include:

  • The base operating system boots an upstream Ubuntu 24.04 LTS foundation alongside Hadron, Kairos’s minimal, upstream-first base layer that compiles and passes CI on riscv64.
  • Core components like kairos-init and hadron build and test continuously on RISE RISC-V GitHub Actions runners, catching architecture regressions before code merges.
  • Orchestration runtimes successfully boot lightweight Kubernetes (k3s) on riscv64.
  • Public artifacts, including bootable ISOs and raw OCI scratch disk images on Quay (quay.io/mauromorales/kairos-riscv64:0.1.3-img), are now available for developer testing.

Why Moving Out of the VM Matters

Software emulation and native CI runners provide confidence during early development, but real-world edge deployments run on physical silicon. Physical boards introduce variables that emulators cannot fully replicate, including non-standard bootloaders, device tree configurations, UEFI and OpenSBI implementations, storage controller timings, eMMC and NVMe initialization, and heterogeneous network interfaces.

By opening up testing to the broader community, Kairos is bridging the gap between automated CI validation and real-world hardware readiness.

How to Participate

Whether you are a hardware enthusiast with development boards or a cloud-native software engineer, you can help move this effort forward:

  1. Test on Real Hardware: If you have access to RISC-V hardware from vendors like StarFive, SiFive, Milk-V, SpacemiT, or Banana Pi, download the ISO or unpack the Quay raw disk image, run a manual installation using kairos-agent, and share feedback and boot logs directly on the Kairos GitHub Issue Tracker at github.com/kairos-io/kairos/issues.
  2. Amplify Upstream Demand: Long-term maintainability depends on core orchestrators shipping official riscv64 release artifacts. Support upstream multi-arch efforts by engaging with tracking issues, including k3s issue 7151 and k0s issue 1919.

Empowering the Open-Source Ecosystem

The collaboration between Kairos and RISE demonstrates how shared developer infrastructure accelerates open-source productization. When community projects have access to native hardware runners, upstream runtime improvements, and cross-ecosystem collaboration, the entire RISC-V landscape matures from low-level silicon enablement into turnkey cloud-native solutions.

To read Mauro Morales’s original announcement, visit the Kairos blog.