GNU toolchain for RISC-V including GCC

https://github.com/riscv-collab/riscv-gnu-toolchain

by teleforce • 3 years ago

178 24 3 years ago

sakras• 3 years ago

Can anyone in the know explain the significance of this toolchain? Haven’t we been able to compile for RISC-V for years now? At the very least I was doing it ~4 years ago for my undergrad research

snvzz2• 3 years ago

This is just a guess, but perhaps this is just someone who's written a script to easily set up a crossdev toolchain.

... which is indeed a very solved problem. Most distributions have RISC-V toolchains packaged and readily available.

chungy• 3 years ago

It is odd. It's trivially installable on Debian from any host architecture, even.

MobiusHorizons• 3 years ago

you don't even need a dedicated cross compiler if you have clang installed (eg the standard clang you can install from homebrew, or the one shipped with freebsd). you just have to pass it a few flags to target risc v. `clang --target=riscv32 -march=rv32i -mabi=ilp32`

nine_k2• 3 years ago

Was the previous toolchain all under GPL? This might be the significant change.

zen_1• 3 years ago

This is still GCC, so it's guaranteed to be under the GPL

Gigachad• 3 years ago

Unless the existing one was proprietary, wouldn't this be no change at all since an MIT toolchain gives you everything GPL gives + more.

stffrdhrn• 3 years ago

I think what is nice about this project is that it combines everything in a mono repo which is nice for setting up continuous integration and other testing workflows. This project can be used to build toolchains for newlib (bare metal), musl and glibc. It also will allow building qemu and spike (instruction simulation) simulators to allow running RISC-V code without special hardware. It can then run each project's test suites as well as it has some integration tests (dhrystone).

This repo will be useful for getting started with toolchain development. If you are just a user wanting to write c/c++ app code then use your distro's toolchain packages.

bayindirh4• 3 years ago

Having a completely Free and Open Source toolchain for a CPU architecture is a great thing to have, which means one can develop tools and other layers on top of it which can be Free and Open Source as well.

Many processors and platforms die because of lack of GNU licensed tools if they fail to be adopted by a critical mass or the developer of the platform doesn't feel like supporting it anymore (Radxa Rock comes into my mind).

So, having an unencumbered and free toolchain ensures that the platform can live on no-matter-what. It's very valuable in my eyes because of that.

riceart3• 3 years ago

I think the person you’re replying to likely knows all this? But thanks, I guess — people doing architecture or compiler research likely don’t need an explanation of the benefits of an open source compiler, especially for RISC-V. In case you are not aware - RISC-V support was added to gcc years ago (I believe it was the first major C compiler targeting it), so the question is what is the significance of this particular repo (hardly unique as far as packaged scripts go - it seems to just pull in the various upstream components as submodules) being posted now. I sort of have the same question.

chatmasta• 3 years ago

I'm guessing this was posted because RISC-V SBCs are starting to ship, with VisionFive2 and Pine64 recently announcing availability of their boards (although I haven't seen the one from Pine64 in stock yet). Especially with the RaspberryPi shortage, I expect that as RISC-V gains software stability, these boards will start to fill the SBC niche.

Meanwhile, institutions like NASA [0] and the EU [1] are making big investments in the architecture. You can sense the hype by looking at the top submissions in r/riscv [2] from the past year.

I think this architecture is very promising. I'm excited for the ecosystem to mature.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/95911-sifive-risc-v-cores-micr...

[1] https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/16/europe-to-dish-out-e270-m...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/RISCV/top/?sort=top&t=year

rurban• 3 years ago

Everything needs an upstream. This was the upstream until things got merged, and now most things are linked to.

Still useful to test everything together.

shash• 3 years ago

Isn't this the one everyone is using currently? What's new here?

ddevault• 3 years ago

GCC has had upstream support for RISC-V for ages, and your typical cross or native GNU toolchain (via your distros or otherwise) supports it.

sylware2• 3 years ago

I don't really get the point of this toolchain. Isn't risc-v support already in the binutils and gcc?

That said, on risc-v, gcc is mostly for legacy code as risc-v, a standard modern ISA free from toxic IP and that worldwide, is the signal of the start the assembly era. At best expect very high-level language interpreters (python/lua/ruby/javascript//whatever) to have a risc-v assembly written implementations.

bayindirh4• 3 years ago

That repo is 8 years old. It's probably why RISC-V support is already there.

sylware2• 3 years ago

good catch.

brucehoult• 3 years ago

This is the standard RISC-V GNU toolchain top level repo that everyone has been using for nearly a decade. Nothing new here. (It was originally under github.com/riscv/riscv-gnu-toolchain, but was moved 2 or 3 years ago)

GNU toolchain for RISC-V including GCC

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