Article by Ramon Canal, Coordinator of the VITAMIN-V Horizon Europe Project.
Full professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
The Vitamin-V project, funded under the Horizon Europe program, has delivered a comprehensive hardware-software stack to enable secure and efficient cloud services based on the open RISC-V architecture. Our work addresses the growing need for sovereignty and transparency in cloud computing by combining cutting-edge hardware prototypes with robust virtualization and toolchains.
Key Technical Achievements
- Hardware Innovation: Development of Semidynamics’ Atrevido RISC-V RV64GHKBV softcore, optimized for high-performance workloads and advanced memory compression IP from Zeropoint.
- Virtualization & Security: Introduction of VOSYSmonitor, a RISC-V secure monitoring solution, enabling trusted execution environments for multi-tenant platforms.
- Toolchain & Simulation: Contributions to major open-source projects such as LLVM, QEMU, and Gem5, ensuring full support for RISC-V extensions and accelerating adoption in research and industry.
- Cloud Framework Integration: Enhancements to widely used platforms including OpenFaaS, Kubernetes, OpenStack, and KataContainers, enabling seamless deployment of RISC-V workloads in containerized and serverless environments.
- Security Toolset: Delivery of a hardware/software security framework to strengthen isolation and integrity in virtualized environments.
- AI-Based Malware Detection: Development of machine learning models for detecting advanced malware threats, leveraging behavioral and performance counter data for improved accuracy.
- Public Datasets: Release of curated datasets for malware detection research, including hardware performance counter traces and labeled samples, fostering reproducibility and innovation in cybersecurity.
Impact and Open-Source Contributions
Vitamin-V has actively contributed to upstream repositories, ensuring long-term sustainability and community engagement. These contributions span programming languages (Python, Go, Rust), AI frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), and cloud orchestration tools, reinforcing Europe’s position in open computing ecosystems.
Looking Ahead
As the project concludes, partners are pursuing commercial exploitation of key results, including the Atrevido softcore and secure virtualization solutions. These innovations pave the way for trusted, energy-efficient, and sovereign cloud infrastructures built on RISC-V.
For further information on VITAMIN-V, check our webpage: www.vitamin-v.eu
