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ROS 2

Author: Ludovic HENRY ludovic.henry@qti.qualcomm.com
Date: 2026-09-08
Readiness: orange
Scope: RISC-V (riscv64/linux) support status for ROS 2
Audience: Technical leadership, resource allocation strategy
Verification policy: Every claim is cross-referenced to a primary upstream source. Items that could not be verified against a second source are marked [NEEDS VERIFICATION].

1. Project Overview

ROS 2 (Robot Operating System 2) is the standard middleware/runtime framework for robotics software, providing pub/sub messaging (via DDS), services, actions, a component/node lifecycle model, and tooling (launch, bag recording, parameter management) used across industrial, research, and autonomous-systems robotics. ros2/ros2 is a meta-repository: it contains no implementation source code itself, only a manifest (ros2.repos) pinning ~150-200 constituent package repositories (rclcpp, rcl, rmw, rmw_fastrtps, rmw_cyclonedds, etc.) plus build-tooling files (pixi.toml, pixi.lock) and CI workflows.

Governance: The legal entity is the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), renamed Open Robotics in 2017, which retains ultimate authority via its Board of Directors. Day-to-day governance since March 18, 2024 runs through the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA), a membership organization modeled on the Linux Foundation/Eclipse Foundation, covering ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, and shared infrastructure. Structure: a cross-project Technical Governance Committee (TGC) over per-project Project Management Committees (PMC); the ROS PMC has 16 voting members and 12 non-voting committers, meeting weekly (Tuesdays 17:00 UTC), open to community observation. Interim ROS Project Leader: Michael Carroll (Intrinsic/KUKA). License: Apache License 2.0 for core ROS 2, mixed OSS licenses across the wider ecosystem.

Corporate sponsors (OSRA membership, launched March 2024):

Tier Members
Platinum Intrinsic (Google), NVIDIA, Qualcomm Technologies
Gold Apex.AI, Zettascale
Silver Clearpath Robotics, Ekumen, eProsima, PickNik
Associate Silicon Valley Robotics
Supporting Canonical, Open Navigation
Incoming Bosch, ROS-Industrial

Corporate-affiliated maintainers visible in recent ros2/ros2 commit history include Alejandro Hernandez Cordero (Intrinsic), Miguel Company (eProsima), Michael Carroll (Intrinsic.ai), William Woodall and Addisu Z. Taddese (Open Robotics), and Tomoya Fujita (Sony); Chen Lihui (Sony) and Miaofei Mei (Amazon) were welcomed as ROS 2 core maintainers per a January 2021 Discourse announcement.

Community culture on new ports: No REP (ROS Enhancement Proposal), roadmap item, or OSRA statement addresses RISC-V. Support for new architectures is entirely community-driven, not officially sanctioned or tested. A forum moderator on the Open Robotics Discourse explicitly stated they did not know the official status of ROS on RISC-V (Installing ROS2 humble on RISC-V Ubuntu).

2. Port History and Upstreaming Timeline

Date Event Source
2021-08-30 rmw_cyclonedds: -latomic link fix for RISC-V/GCC merged, backported to foxy and galactic ros2/rmw_cyclonedds#332
2022-09 “Robotics MCU” RISC-V + ROS 2 sub-project announced under the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group Open Robotics Discourse
2024-02-08 Tracking issue filed: Mimick (test-mocking library) blocks riscv64 builds ros2/Mimick#30
2024-02-09 “Add RISC-V 64 Support” PR opened against Mimick, cherry-picks a gnu_hash symbol-lookup fix required for riscv64 binaries ros2/Mimick#31
2024-02-13 Acceleration Robotics + Microchip integrate ROS 2 Humble onto the PolarFire SoC FPGA (Icicle Kit), first RISC-V SoC/FPGA with ROS 2 support, ~60K LOC contributed to the community ros/meta-ros Yocto layer (not ros2/ros2) riscv.org blog
2024-02-26 Maintainer opens a throwaway CI-validation PR to run the full ROS 2 CI matrix against the Mimick riscv64 patch ros2/mimick_vendor#36
2025-01-29 Independent community user (LucienMorey) reports running the unmerged Mimick patch in production for approximately 5 months, asks for merge status ros2/Mimick#31 comment
2025-03-12 Maintainer (mjcarroll) states the PR “fell out of the top of my review queue” and proposes resolving conflicts and re-running CI; no further activity recorded since ros2/Mimick#31 comment
2026-06-17 This report’s queue entry logged (RISE internal candidate-tracking) project-reports/.queue.yml (this workspace)

Key contributors: ziyao233 (author of the Mimick riscv64 fix, independent contributor), romancardenas (filed the tracking issue, independently built and verified full ROS 2 on riscv64), LucienMorey (independent 5+ month production validation), mjcarroll (Intrinsic.ai, ROS 2 core maintainer and PR assignee), guillaume-pais-siemens (Siemens, authored the merged rmw_cyclonedds -latomic fix, consistent with Siemens’ separately documented isar-riscv ROS 2 build effort).

Is it fully upstream? No. The only riscv64 fix that has actually merged and shipped in a released ROS 2 distro is the rmw_cyclonedds -latomic linking fix (2021, backported to foxy/galactic). The blocking dependency for a riscv64 build of ROS 2 as a whole - ros2/Mimick#31 - remains open and unmerged as of this report, over 2.5 years after submission, despite being externally verified working and CI-validated. There is no dedicated riscv64 tracking issue in ros2/ros2 itself; the entire effort lives in the ros2/Mimick and ros2/mimick_vendor dependency repos, which most users would not think to search.

3. Upstream Support Tier

ROS 2’s formal platform tier policy is documented in REP 2000. Tiers are defined as: Tier 1 (continuous CI, prioritized bug fixes), Tier 2 (periodic CI, best-effort fixes), Tier 3 (community-reported only, no formal testing, requires up-to-date install docs). Officially supported architectures across Humble, Iron, Jazzy, Kilted, and Rolling are amd64, arm64, and arm32 only. No RISC-V tier exists in any ROS 2 distribution, not even Tier 3 (ros-infrastructure/rep).

Evidence: no riscv64 CI job exists in any of the four ros2/ros2 GitHub Actions workflows (read in full - see Section 7); no riscv64 release-blocking gate exists because no riscv64 CI exists to gate; no official riscv64 binaries are published (see Section 8).

Comparison table: amd64 vs arm64 vs riscv64

Axis amd64 arm64 riscv64
REP 2000 tier Tier 1 Tier 1/2 (varies by distro) Not listed
CI runner in ros2/ros2 ubuntu-latest (pixi-lock, pr, mirror workflows) ubuntu-24.04-arm (pixi-lock matrix) None
Jenkins packaging job (ci.ros2.org) packaging_linux packaging_linux-aarch64 None
Release assets (Lyrical/Jazzy/Humble) Yes (amd64/x86_64 tarballs) Yes (aarch64 tarballs) No

4. Technical Architecture and RISC-V-Specific Subsystems

ros2/ros2 itself contains no implementation code of any kind - it is an 8-file, ~1,008-line manifest/CI-config repository (ros2.repos, four workflow YAML files, three shell scripts, README.md). A code search for #ifdef __riscv repo:ros2/ros2 returns zero results, confirming there are no architecture guards anywhere in the repo, for any architecture, because there is no implementation source to guard. Architecture-specific components (SIMD, crypto, memory allocators) live in ROS 2’s constituent dependency repositories, not in ros2/ros2.

Comparison table: amd64 vs arm64 vs riscv64 (at the ros2/ros2 meta-repo level)

Component amd64 arm64 riscv64
Implementation source files in ros2/ros2 0 (none exist for any arch) 0 0
CI runner support Yes Yes No
Jenkins packaging job Yes Yes No
Published release binary Yes Yes No

The requested per-architecture “hand-tuned/intrinsics/scalar/missing” rating does not meaningfully apply to ros2/ros2: what differs by architecture at this level is purely CI/release coverage, not source-code implementation quality. Genuine architecture-specific subsystems (DDS transport, crypto, compression, numerics) are analyzed per-dependency in Section 9.

5. Build System, Cross-Compilation, and Toolchain

ros2/ros2 publishes no riscv64-specific build documentation. The only cross-compilation document in the official documentation source (ros2/ros2_documentation, file source/Developer-Tools/Build/About-Cross-Compilation.rst) is a generic overview page: it names reasons to cross-compile (machine mismatch, -mcpu=/-mfpu= tuning, custom filesystems) and points to docker buildx for multi-platform images, but contains no toolchain file, no cmake/configure invocation, no GCC/Clang version numbers, no -DUSE_X=OFF flags, and no QEMU instructions.

No BUILDING.md, INSTALL, docs/cross-compilation.md, cmake/riscv64.cmake, or Dockerfile for riscv64 exists anywhere in ros2/ros2. ros-tooling/cross_compile (Open Robotics’ own deprecated cross-compilation CLI, supporting armhf/aarch64/x86) has zero riscv references and no riscv64 TargetArch entry.

Known build failure and workaround (community-sourced, not officially documented):

  • GCC does not automatically link libatomic on RISC-V; rmw_cyclonedds_cpp requires it. Fixed and merged: ros2/rmw_cyclonedds#332.
  • The Mimick test-mocking library’s symbol lookup breaks on riscv64 binaries because RISC-V binaries use GNU-hash symbol tables, and Mimick’s lookup only supported traditional hash tables. Fix exists but is unmerged: ros2/Mimick#31.
  • Community members who have built ROS 2 from source on riscv64 report using QEMU-based Debian sid/Ubuntu riscv64 images with the unmerged Mimick patch applied manually (Discourse: Installing ROS2 humble on RISC-V Ubuntu).
  • Siemens’ isar-riscv project documents a Yocto/isar-based build producing ROS 2 Foxy .deb packages for riscv64, including QEMU-based image builds: siemens/isar-riscv ROS2.md.

There is no exact, upstream-published, reproducible riscv64 build command sequence for ROS 2.

6. Feature Coverage and Gap Analysis vs arm64 and amd64

Feature amd64 arm64 riscv64
Official REP 2000 tier Yes Yes No tier
CI-validated build Yes Yes No (upstream); yes, unofficially, per community reports
CI-validated test suite Yes Yes No
Official release binary Yes Yes No
DDS middleware (rmw_cyclonedds) link correctness Yes Yes Yes (fix merged 2021)
DDS middleware (rmw_fastrtps) riscv64 CI Yes Yes No riscv64 CI in eProsima Fast-DDS/Fast-CDR (generic C++17, no arch-specific asm)
Test infrastructure (Mimick mocking library) Yes Yes No (blocking PR unmerged)
Documented cross-compilation path Yes (generic) Yes (generic) No riscv64-specific instructions

Functional gaps: ROS 2 cannot currently be built end-to-end from official, unmodified upstream tooling on riscv64, because the test-mocking dependency (Mimick) fails at the symbol-lookup level on riscv64 binaries and its fix is unmerged. Users who want a working riscv64 build must manually apply the unmerged patch or rely on third-party Yocto (Siemens isar-riscv) or FPGA-integration (Acceleration Robotics/meta-ros) build paths.

Performance gaps: Data not available: no quantitative ROS 2 riscv64-vs-arm64 or riscv64-vs-amd64 benchmark data (throughput, latency, CPU%) was found on any channel searched (RISE blog, GitHub, WebSearch). The one qualitative data point available is negative: Acceleration Robotics/PlanV’s “Robotics MCU” project found that “the performance obtained in RISC-V soft-core based ROS 2 implementations explored was not bringing much value on top of existing CPU implementations of ROS 2,” and the project was subsequently redirected toward an FPGA-based implementation instead (news.accelerationrobotics.com). No exact figures were recoverable from that source. [NEEDS VERIFICATION - single source, and the source page itself could not be directly fetched in this session (connection reset); the claim rests on a WebSearch-surfaced summary of that page].

Security hardening gaps: ROS 2’s SROS2 (DDS-Security) crypto backend is OpenSSL, which has active riscv64 support (dedicated ASM AES, GCM via Zbb/Zbc, riscv64 CI) but a flagged open issue: the AES T-table fallback path is not constant-time on hardware lacking the Zkn/Zvkned crypto extensions, which describes most current riscv64 silicon; fix PRs #31080 and #31082 were open as of mid-2026 per project-reports/openssl.md. This is a dependency-level gap, not a ROS 2-specific one, but it directly affects SROS2 security on riscv64 hardware.

NaN / floating-point semantics issues: Data not available: no RISC-V floating-point/NaN semantics issue specific to ROS 2 was found in any search of ros2/ros2 or the broader ros2 GitHub org.

7. CI/CD Infrastructure

No riscv64 CI exists anywhere in ros2/ros2. All four GitHub Actions workflow files were read in full directly from a clone of the repository (HEAD f4c29669ecba5517fe14d482b8878769078ea91f, 2026-09-01):

  1. mirror-rolling-to-master.yaml - mirrors the rolling branch to master on push. runs-on: ubuntu-latest. No build/test, no riscv reference.
  2. pr.yaml (“ROS 2 Repos Check”) - lints/validates ros2.repos YAML on pull requests. runs-on: ubuntu-latest. No riscv reference.
  3. pixi-lock.yaml - validates the pixi lockfile solve. Jobs run on ubuntu-latest, or on a matrix (install job) whose runner is selected by .github/scripts/pixi-lock-matrix.sh, which maps linux-64 -> ubuntu-latest, linux-aarch64 -> ubuntu-24.04-arm, win-64 -> windows-latest, osx-64 -> macos-15-intel, osx-arm64 -> macos-latest, and explicitly errors (“No runner is mapped for platform”) for anything else. pixi.toml declares platforms = ["win-64", "linux-64"] only - even linux-aarch64 is not an active target today, let alone riscv64.
  4. release-nightlies.yaml - republishes Jenkins (ci.ros2.org) nightly binaries as GitHub Releases, triggered hourly (schedule) and by workflow_dispatch. runs-on: ubuntu-latest. Job names pulled from Jenkins: packaging_linux, packaging_windows, packaging_linux-rhel, packaging_linux-aarch64 - aarch64, not riscv64. The artifact-naming logic branches only on aarch64 vs default amd64; there is no riscv branch.

A repository-wide, case-insensitive grep -rni "riscv" . across the entire ros2/ros2 working tree returned zero matches. No .gitlab-ci.yml, Jenkinsfile, or .cirrus.yml exists anywhere in the repo. The Jenkins instance at ci.ros2.org, referenced by release-nightlies.yaml but external to this repo, could not be inspected directly in this session.

No RISE RISC-V Runners are referenced anywhere in ros2/ros2 or the wider ros2 GitHub org.

Comparison table: amd64 vs arm64 vs riscv64

Axis amd64 arm64 riscv64
GitHub Actions CI runner ubuntu-latest ubuntu-24.04-arm (pixi-lock matrix only) None
Jenkins packaging job (ci.ros2.org) packaging_linux packaging_linux-aarch64 None
pixi.toml declared platform Yes (linux-64) No (not declared, despite CI runner existing) No
RISE runner usage N/A N/A None found

8. Distribution and Release Status

No official riscv64 binaries exist for ROS 2 on any channel checked.

  • GitHub Releases: The three most recent release trains were checked via the public release-asset listing (GitHub API access to ros2/ros2 is blocked for this session’s tooling; verified via the public web UI’s /releases/expanded_assets/<tag> fragments):
    • release-lyrical-20260807 (“Lyrical Luth - Patch Release 2”): rhel10-x86_64, ubuntu2604-aarch64, ubuntu2604-x86_64, Windows-AMD64, source archives. No riscv64.
    • release-jazzy-20260618 (“Jazzy Jalisco - Patch Release 8”): linux-noble-amd64, linux-noble-arm64, rhel9-amd64, source archives. No riscv64.
    • release-humble-20260220 (“Humble Hawksbill - Patch Release 14”): linux-centos-amd64, linux-jammy-amd64, linux-jammy-arm64, windows-release-amd64, source archives. No riscv64.
  • PyPI: the package name “ros-2” does not exist on PyPI at all (https://pypi.org/pypi/ros-2/json returns HTTP 404, confirmed independently via https://pypi.org/simple/ros-2/). This is consistent with ROS 2 not being pip-distributed upstream, not a riscv64-specific gap.
  • RISE GitLab wheel mirror: https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/56254198/packages/pypi/simple/ros-2/ redirects to the same 404 PyPI page. No package found.
  • Ubuntu 26.04 (resolute): packages.ubuntu.com search for “ros2” and “ros-2” (name search, suite=resolute) returns zero results - “Sorry, your search gave no results.” No ROS 2 package exists under any plausible name in this suite, on any architecture, not merely riscv64.
  • Arch Linux RISC-V (archriscv.felixc.at): no ROS 2 package found for queries “ros2” or “ros 2”.
  • Ubuntu package graph (project-graph MCP SPARQL query): could not be verified - the project-graph MCP server failed to connect (CONNECTION_CLOSED) on every attempt across multiple research passes this session. This is a tooling failure and should be treated as unknown/unchecked, not as confirming absence, though the direct packages.ubuntu.com search above independently confirms no ROS 2 package exists in resolute.

What a user must do to get a working binary today: There is no path to an official riscv64 binary. To run ROS 2 on riscv64, a user must either (a) build from source, manually applying the unmerged ros2/Mimick#31 patch to work around the test-mocking library’s symbol-lookup failure, following community-documented steps on the Open Robotics Discourse, or (b) use a third-party build pipeline such as Siemens’ isar-riscv Yocto layer (produces Foxy .deb packages) or Acceleration Robotics’ meta-ros Yocto integration for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA. Neither is an Open Robotics-sanctioned release channel.

9. Dependencies

ros2/ros2 has no single build manifest; dependencies were identified by parsing ros2.repos (rolling branch, commit f4c2966) plus package.xml files in ros2/rosbag2, focused on SIMD/numerics, crypto, compression, and memory-allocator categories (ROS 2 core has no JIT backends).

Dependency Role riscv64 build riscv64 test riscv64 release Community/notes
eProsima Fast-DDS Default RMW middleware (rmw_fastrtps), DDS transport No riscv64 CI job in ~30 workflow files (ubuntu/mac/windows only); generic C++17/CMake Not exercised on riscv64 in CI No official riscv64 binaries 0 open riscv64 issues found
eProsima Fast-CDR CDR wire-format serialization for Fast-DDS No riscv CI workflow Not exercised Built alongside Fast-DDS 0 riscv64 issues
eProsima foonathan_memory_vendor Vendored pool/arena allocator for Fast-DDS internals Portable C++, no riscv CI Not exercised Source-vendored only 0 riscv64 issues (1 unrelated QNX hit)
Eclipse Cyclone DDS Alternative RMW middleware (rmw_cyclonedds), default in several distros No riscv CI job Not exercised No official riscv64 release binaries 0 riscv64 issues (1 unrelated ARM64 hit); note the ROS-side -latomic fix (#332) is on the ROS wrapper, not Cyclone DDS itself
Eclipse iceoryx Zero-copy shared-memory transport for large-message intra-host performance No riscv job in any workflow Not exercised No riscv64 release artifacts 0 riscv64 issues
Eigen (ros2/eigen3_cmake_module) Header-only linear-algebra/SIMD numerics (tf2, perception, planning) RVV1.0 backend merged to master 2025-11-20, requires opt-in -DEIGEN_RISCV64_USE_RVV10, not auto-detected Native SpacemiT K3 CI runner, but allow_failure: true (non-gating) Not shipped in any release (3.4.1, 5.0.1 predate the RVV work) GCC-14 vector-bits flag bug fixed; missing tail-optimization (issue #3086, ~2x slowdown estimated). Full detail: project-reports/eigen.md
TLSF (ros2/tlsf) Real-time deterministic allocator for rcl/rclcpp No CI files at all in the repo Not independently tested Source-only 0 riscv64 issues
OpenSSL DDS-Security crypto backend for SROS2 Active riscv64 support: ASM AES, GCM via Zbb/Zbc, capability detection, riscv64 CI (FIPS excluded) Tested in upstream CI on native riscv64 runners; occasional flakes (#30880) Regular tagged releases include riscv64-capable source 66 riscv64-tagged issues. Open: musl extension detection (#28118), SHA256 perf (#28664), Zknd/Zkne AES requirement (#25334). Critical: AES T-table fallback not constant-time on most current riscv64 silicon, fixes open (#31080/#31082). Full detail: project-reports/openssl.md
zstd Compression for rosbag2_compression_zstd and MCAP storage Best-effort community support; no dedicated riscv64 CI runner Build-time checks only No riscv64 prebuilt binaries or PyPI wheel 5 riscv64 issues: open RFEs for RVV-accelerated XXH3 (#4471) and unaligned access (#4546). Full detail: project-reports/zstd.md
LZ4 Compression for rosbag2 Functionally complete per existing report Passes full test suite under QEMU Ships in major distros; no PyPI wheel 1 closed riscv64 issue, no blocker. Full detail: project-reports/lz4.md
yaml-cpp (ros2/yaml_cpp_vendor) YAML parsing for parameter/launch files No riscv-specific code paths (pure portable C++) Not independently verified Source-vendored 0 riscv64 issues
libyaml (ros2/libyaml_vendor) C YAML parser for rcl_yaml_param_parser Pure portable C, no arch-specific code Not independently verified Source-vendored; packaged generally as libyaml-dev 0 riscv64 issues
spdlog (ros2/spdlog_vendor) Logging backend for rcl_logging_spdlog No riscv CI; portable C++ Not independently verified Source-vendored 0 riscv64 issues (1 unrelated ARM64 CI hit)
MCAP (foxglove/mcap, via mcap_vendor) ROS 2 bag storage format No riscv CI found Not independently verified No riscv64 release binaries found 0 riscv64 issues

Deep-dive: critical dependencies with SIMD/crypto/numerics content

  • OpenSSL has the deepest and most actively maintained riscv64 support of any ROS 2 dependency, but carries a real open security gap: the AES fallback path used on hardware lacking Zkn/Zvkned crypto extensions (most current riscv64 silicon) is not constant-time, directly relevant to SROS2’s DDS-Security encryption/authentication plugins. See project-reports/openssl.md for full detail.
  • Eigen has real RVV1.0 work merged to master but it is unreleased, opt-in, and non-release-gating (allow_failure: true); no ROS 2 release currently benefits from it since ROS 2 depends on tagged Eigen releases that predate the RVV backend. See project-reports/eigen.md.
  • The DDS middleware stack itself (Fast-DDS, Fast-CDR, Cyclone DDS, iceoryx, foonathan::memory, TLSF) shows no evidence of riscv64-specific testing, CI, or reported issues at all. This most likely means these portable-C++ libraries build fine as generic code, but this is genuinely unverified upstream - a gap worth flagging since none of these are currently tracked as standalone projects in this workspace’s projects.yml.

11. Known Bugs and Active Issues

ID Title Status Severity Notes
ros2/Mimick#31 Add RISC-V 64 Support Open, unmerged since 2024-02-09 Blocking (test infrastructure) Externally verified working (romancardenas built full ROS 2; LucienMorey ran 5+ months in production); CI-validated via #36; blocked purely on maintainer review bandwidth and merge conflicts, not technical objection
ros2/Mimick#30 Support for RISC-V 64 Open, tracking issue since 2024-02-08 Blocking (tracks #31) Requests merge of #31 to unblock riscv64 builds
ros2/mimick_vendor#36 Update SHA to test ros2/Mimick#31 Closed (throwaway CI-validation, not a permanent change) N/A Confirms #31 passes ROS 2’s full CI matrix (Linux, Linux-aarch64, Windows) on other platforms
ros2/rmw_cyclonedds#332 add -latomic for RISC-V Merged 2021-08-30, backported to foxy/galactic Correctness (build-blocking without fix) The one riscv64 fix that has actually shipped in a released ROS 2 distro

Correctness bugs: No open, RISC-V-specific correctness or performance bug is on file against ros2/ros2 itself - exhaustive search (riscv64 performance, riscv nan floating, riscv, riscv64 bug, all scoped to repo:ros2/ros2) returned zero genuine hits (two apparent matches, #260 and #1059, are false positives on “arch64” semantic matching for unrelated ARM issues). The Mimick#31 gap is a build/test-infrastructure blocker, not a runtime correctness bug in ROS 2 itself.

12. Objections and Upstream Blockers

Stated objections: None found. No maintainer or PMC member has stated a technical objection to RISC-V support. The blocker is explicitly framed by the assignee as a bandwidth/scheduling issue: “this fell out of the top of my review queue. I think the best thing here is to resolve the conflicts, then I can bump the SHA in the vendor package and run it through CI again” (ros2/Mimick#31, comment by mjcarroll, 2025-03-12).

Technical blockers:

  1. ros2/Mimick#31 has merge conflicts requiring a rebase against upstream Mimick before it can be merged.
  2. Even once Mimick is fixed, no CI or release infrastructure exists in ros2/ros2 to build, test, or publish riscv64 artifacts - merging Mimick unblocks source builds only, not an official binary release path.
  3. No REP 2000 tier entry exists for RISC-V in any distribution; even Tier 3 (community-reported, install-docs-only) has not been formally added, despite the bar being low enough to be achievable per the community discussion.

Organizational blockers: OSRA/TGC/PMC governance has no stated roadmap item for RISC-V. No OSRA sponsor tier member (Intrinsic/Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Apex.AI, Zettascale, Clearpath, Ekumen, eProsima, PickNik, Canonical, Bosch, ROS-Industrial) has been observed sponsoring or funding riscv64 work in ros2/ros2 or its core dependency repos, based on the sources reviewed for this report.

Acceptance probability: The path to a merged fix for the sole hard blocker (Mimick#31) is narrow and low-effort - a rebase plus a re-run of existing CI - and has already been independently validated by two community members over an extended period. This suggests high technical acceptance probability if maintainer time is allocated, but there has been no forward motion since March 12, 2025 (over 18 months as of this report), and no organizational commitment to prioritize it exists.

13. Readiness Assessment

  • Color: orange (plain Step-1 “no upstream riscv64 CI”; the distribution floor does not apply because no distribution ships any ROS 2 package under any name, so there is nothing to upgrade)
  • Release provider: none (no riscv64 artifact is published by upstream, RISE, any Linux distribution, or any consumable third-party channel; Siemens’ isar-riscv is a Yocto build recipe a user must build themselves, not a published binary release)
  • Justification: All four GitHub Actions workflows in ros2/ros2 were read in full and contain zero riscv64 references, and pixi.toml declares build platforms as ["win-64", "linux-64"] only. The three most recent release trains (Lyrical, Jazzy, Humble) ship no riscv64 asset (release pages), and REP 2000 lists only amd64, arm64, and arm32 as supported architectures across all current distributions, with no RISC-V tier at any level.
  • Pending work that could change the grade: merging ros2/Mimick#31 (rebase + CI re-run, technically validated and independently production-tested) would unblock riscv64 source builds and is the single highest-leverage pending item. No RISE Project involvement of any kind was found - no blog posts, no wheel-builder entries, no dedicated repository, no funded work, no runner usage anywhere in the riseproject-dev GitHub org or on riseproject.dev. ROS 2 sits only on RISE’s internal “to research” queue (project-reports/.queue.yml) with no prior report and no funded engagement to date.

14. Investment Analysis

What RISE has already done or funded here: nothing. Exhaustive checks of the RISE blog (36 posts enumerated via sitemap, none mention ROS/ROS 2/robotics), the RISE Python wheel builder (89 packages listed, no ROS 2/ros2/micro-ros entry), the riseproject-dev GitHub org (25 repos, none dedicated to ROS 2/robotics; org-wide code search returns only this workspace’s own internal tracking files), and riseproject.dev/members (no Open Robotics, OSRA, or ROS-affiliated organization listed) all confirm zero RISE engagement. This matches the identical conclusion independently reached for the adjacent micro-ROS project in project-reports/micro-ros.md (readiness: orange), which states plainly: “What RISE has already done or funded here: nothing.” All investment items below represent genuinely unfunded, un-started work.

14.1 Functional Enablement

The highest-leverage, lowest-effort item is completing the one known blocking dependency fix: rebasing and merging ros2/Mimick#31, which is already written, externally validated (two independent community users, one with 5+ months of production use), and CI-validated on other platforms via ros2/mimick_vendor#36. This requires upstream maintainer engagement (the PR is not RISE’s to merge unilaterally), but RISE could fund or directly contribute the rebase work and actively engage mjcarroll/the ROS PMC to prioritize review. Beyond Mimick, a full riscv64 build has never been validated end-to-end against official ROS 2 CI - establishing that baseline (build + core test suite for a representative distro, e.g. rolling or jazzy) is unstarted work.

14.2 Performance Optimization

Not applicable as a primary investment area yet - functional enablement is the prerequisite. Downstream numerics (Eigen RVV1.0, unreleased/opt-in) and crypto (OpenSSL, active but with an open constant-time gap) are tracked separately in their own project reports and are not ROS 2-specific investment items. The one available signal on ROS 2 RISC-V performance is negative and unquantified (Acceleration Robotics/PlanV’s soft-core conclusion, Section 6) - before investing in ROS 2-specific performance work, a first step would be establishing real benchmark numbers, since none currently exist publicly.

14.3 CI/CD Infrastructure

No riscv64 CI exists in ros2/ros2 at all. Standing up CI (build plus test) for even one distro/branch (e.g. rolling) on riscv64 - potentially using RISE RISC-V Runners - would be new, unfunded infrastructure work, contingent on the Mimick blocker being resolved first (otherwise the test phase cannot pass). This is a multi-repo effort in practice, since ros2/ros2’s own CI (pixi-lock, repos-check) does not exercise package builds at all; the actual build/test CI lives in each constituent package repo and ultimately in the Jenkins instance at ci.ros2.org, which was not inspectable in this session.

14.4 Ecosystem Enablement

Section 10 is omitted for this report: ROS 2 is a middleware/runtime framework, not a package ecosystem with a large dependent-package graph in the sense (Python/npm/Maven/Kubernetes-operator packages) that Section 10 is scoped to cover.

14.5 Summary Table

Area Work Item Effort (person-weeks) Owner Priority
Functional Rebase and drive ros2/Mimick#31 to merge (upstream engagement + rebase) 1-2 RISE-funded contributor + upstream (mjcarroll/ROS PMC) Critical
Functional Validate end-to-end riscv64 build of a representative ROS 2 distro (rolling) post-Mimick-merge, against official CI tooling 2-3 RISE-funded contributor High
CI/CD Stand up riscv64 CI (build + test) for ros2/ros2 constituent core packages, potentially using RISE RISC-V Runners 3-5 RISE-funded contributor + upstream review High
CI/CD Investigate and, if feasible, propose adding riscv64 as a Tier 3 REP 2000 platform once a working build exists 1 RISE-funded contributor + upstream (ROS PMC) Medium
Performance Establish baseline ROS 2-on-riscv64 benchmark data (none currently exists publicly) 2 RISE-funded contributor Medium
Dependency Confirm/establish riscv64 CI status for the untested-but-unflagged DDS middleware stack (Fast-DDS, Fast-CDR, Cyclone DDS, iceoryx, foonathan::memory, TLSF) - none currently tracked in projects.yml 1-2 RISE-funded contributor Medium

15. Updates

(No updates yet - initial report dated 2026-09-08.)

16. References