The Harmonic Firmware Initiative "HFI" is trying to provide a generic, standardized power-on firmware experience for RISC-V boards. Akin to the x86 world with having immediate graphics card initialization to provide a display while the system is booting and also having a BIOS setup utility for system configuration, HFI is trying to do the same for the RISC-V world.

Developers behind the recently covered QSOE QNX-inpsired RISC-V operating system are leading the charge for HFI to improve the initial boot/power-on experience for RISC-V hardware. The initial target for HFI is the SiFive HiFive Unmatched board.

HFI is developed as an extension of U-Boot and is working to provide proper graphics card initialization, a Power On Self Test POST-like screen, and a BIOS setup program.

Those curious about HFI and wanting to learn more for improving the initial power-on experience for RISC-V hardware can find the project details at QSOE.net .

For right now their target is just the SiFive HiFive Unmatched while it will be interesting to see how much uptake there is from the community. It's an interesting and worthwhile effort for enhancing the RISC-V power-on experience but to really take off it will need to see some uptake from the major RISC-V hardware vendors.