What follows is my own words and interpretation of what a RISC-V (I say vee by default but it really is "five" after the roman numeral V). A RISC-V ISA (instruction set architecture) is the brainchild of Mr. Patterson at Berkeley University in Berkeley, California, USA. His students helped develop this architecture further and it became an open document on what and what the instructions and otherwise op codes are. Many manufacturers of CPU's jumped on this. Particularily China based manufacturers were delighted by the Open Approach. Many of the RISC-V Computers that I personally have are either made 100% in China or have an American CPU core (made by Sifive). To me personally the open approach ..Is the future of computers. We "the laymens" can finally get real documentation on how these computers actually work. This to me is very positive. This is why I keep trying (often unsuccessfully) on making things work. I chose OpenBSD because in my eyes it is the best quality of Open Source there exists. But OpenBSD needs help, help from smart programmers who don't work for money especially. Some do. Many don't though. Their code will eternally be in the repository tree available to all. This opens them to criticism and double checking, the latter is good the former is not wished upon by anyone. Keep your criticizings to yourself we're doing the best we all (individually) can.
Was ported by a computer science group in California led by Mr. Larkin, where I was able to take a peek in how they work. I keep thinking I'm forgetting one person, but the people were: Mars, Brian, Wenyan, and Shivam. Also late in the port Mr. Rahn helped them, but I wasn't there for that much.
Once the check-in was made into the OpenBSD CVS repo, a lot of people improved the code. There was a lot to improve. There is too many to name who contrib'ed to this.
I personally used the QEMU port on my Raspberry Pi4b for a bit running this architecture. Then in 2023 (probably around summer) I got my first RISCV hardware a starfive visionfive2. Soon followed a Mango Pi D1, and then a second one which I donated to Mark Kettenis in the Netherlands. Mark and team managed to make Mango Pi D1 work (based on tree) near January 30th, 2024. Now that this work is done, I'm going back to a certain project of mine which I put on ice for a long time. It is a wifi project. I have a C906 based 0x64 pine64 SoC which looks like a chewing gum format circuit board. It only has 64 MB RAM and I'm hoping I can somehow make it work. We'll see.