RISC-V certification is becoming a reproducible engineering pipeline instead of a logo backed by a test report. The draft Certification Test Plan connects profile requirements to machine-readable configurations, functional coverpoints, reference models, and assembly tests. The shift is from claiming ISA compatibility to producing evidence that another team can rerun.
The plan uses YAML configurations to describe extensions and parameters, then maps those configurations into applicable suites and coverage. That matters because optional extensions, privileged behavior, and constrained nondeterminism are where two implementations that both call themselves RISC-V stop behaving alike. A shared abstraction layer and explicit coverpoints give core vendors, verification teams, and software maintainers the same definition of done.
The next proof point is certification running as a required CI job on commercial core releases. If the steering committee ships that workflow against RVA23 certificates in 2027, vendors with private compliance harnesses will have to compete on implementation quality instead of test opacity.