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Answering in good faith here...

It's a virtual machine for the RISC-V architecture, as is evident from the title.

A virtual machine is software that emulates hardware.

RISC-V is an open-source processor architecture that allows anyone to design, build, emulate and modify the CPU architecture without fear of legal repercussions. RISC-V is currently becoming quite popular due to the release of actual hardware, with more coming in the near future.

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Nitpick: In the general case, a virtual machine doesn't necessarily emulate hardware, it might just be an abstract specification (e.g. the Java JVM)

The JVM still is an abstract specification of computer hardware (instruction set, register set, memory organization). That it wasn't designed for hardware implementation is a very minor nitpick.

But then someone did do a hardware implementation:

https://www.jopdesign.com/ https://github.com/jop-devel/jop

"Due to the small size of the processor, it can be implemented in a low cost FPGA. ..."

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