Comment by storus
4 hours ago
Will RISC-V end up with the same (or even worse) platform fragmentation as ARM? Because of absence of any common platform standard we have phones that are only good for landfill once their support lifetime is up, drivers never getting upstreamed to Linux kernel (or upstreaming not even possible due to completely quixotic platforms and boot protocols each manufacturer creates). RISC-V allows even higher fragmentation in the portions of instruction sets each CPU supports, e.g. one manufacturer might decide MUL/DIV are not needed for their CPU etc. ("M" extension).
RVA23 is the standard target for compilers now. If you support newer stuff, it’ll take a while before software catches up (just like SVE in ARM or AVX in x86).
If you try to make your own extensions, the standard compiler flags won’t be supporting it and it’ll probably be limited to your own software. If it’s actually good, you’ll have to get everyone on board with a shared, open design, then get it added to a future RVA standard.
Thanks, that however addresses only a part of the problem. ARM is also suffering from no boot/initialization standard where each manufacturer does it their own way instead of what PC had with BIOS or UEFI, making ARM devices incompatible with each other. I believe the same holds with RISC-V.
There is a RISC-V Server Platform Spec [0] on the way supposed to standardise SBI, UEFI and ACPI for server chips, and it is expected to be ratified next month. (I have not read it myself yet)
[0]: https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-server-platform
There has been concerted effort to start working on these kinds of standards, but it takes time to develop and reach a consensus.
Some stuff like BRS (Boot and Runtime Services Specification)and SBI (Supervisor Binary Interface) already exist.
The answer is unequivocally yes: RISC-V is designed to be customizable and a vendor can put whatever they like into a given CPU. That being said, profiles and platform specs are designed to limit fragmentation. The modular design and core essential ISA also makes fat binaries much more straight-forward to implement than other ISAs.
You can choose to develop proprietary extensions, but who’s going to use them?
A great case study is the companies that implemented the pre-release vector standard in their chips.
The final version is different in a few key ways. Despite substantial similarities to the ratified version, very few people are coding SIMD for those chips.
If a proprietary extension does something actually useful to everyone, it’ll either be turned into an open standard or a new open standard will be created to replace it. In either case, it isn’t an issue.
The only place I see proprietary extensions surviving is in the embedded space where they already do this kind of stuff, but even that seems to be the exception with the RISCV chips I’ve seen. Using standard compilers and tooling instead of a crappy custom toolchain (probably built on an old version of Eclipse) is just nicer (And cheaper for chip makers).