Comment by dmitrygr
1 year ago
And which cores currently support it? And unless the answer is “all”, it will not be used. Feature detection works for well-isolated high-performance kernels using things like AVX. No one‘s going to do feature detection for load/store instructions. Which means that all your binaries will be compiled to the lowest common denominator
As I said, it's mandatory in RVA23 profile. In fact it has been mandatory since RVA22 profile. A bunch of cores appear to support RVA22.
Whether prebuilt distribution binaries support it or not, I can't tell. Simple glance at Debian and Fedora wiki pages doesn't reveal what profile they target, and I CBA to boot an image in qemu to check. In the worst case they target only GC so they won't have Zba. Source distributions like Gentoo would not have a problem.
In any case, talking about the current level of extension support is moving the goalposts. You countered "there is nothing about the RISC-V architecture which inherently prevents it from ever being competitive with ARM" with "Lack of reg+shifted reg addressing mode", which is an argument about ISA, not implementation.
ubuntu announced they want to suppory RVA23 in their next LTS 25.04 IIRC. That doesn't really make sense, unless we get new hardware with RVA23 support till then.
Isn’t there next LTS 26.04?
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The reality is everyone is targeting RV64GC, until we get cheap and widely available RVA23 boards. At some point after that, everyone will switch.
Zb extension is in both RVA22 and RVA23 profiles, meaning application cores (targeting consumer devices like smartphones) designed in the past few years almost certainly have shXadd instructions in order to be compatible with the mainstream software ecosystem
> meaning application cores (targeting consumer devices like smartphones
where are they?
You are aware that hardware takes time to build, tapeout and productise?
On the open-source front, I can right now download a RVA23 supporting RISC-V implementation, simulate the RTL and have it out perform my current Zen1 desktop per cycle in scalar code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41331786 (see the XiangShanV3 numbers)
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RVA23 will become the only thing anyone targets
In the year of the Linux desktop, with Wayland and IPv6 for all. /s