RISC-V Toolchain Conventions

Copyright and license information

This document is authored by a range of contributors.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). The full license text is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Aims

This effort aims to document the expected behaviour and command-line interface of RISC-V toolchains. In doing so, we can provide an avenue for members of the GNU and LLVM communities to collaborate on standardising and extending these conventions. A diverse range of RISC-V implementations and custom extensions will inevitably result in vendor-specific toolchains being created and distributed. By describing a clear preferred path for exposing vendor-specific extensions or modifications, we can try to increase the likelihood that these vendor toolchain distributions have a common interface and aren't gratuitously different.

Status and roadmap

This document is a work-in-progress, and contains many sections that serve mainly to enumerate current gaps or oddities. The plan is to seek feedback and further develop the proposal with the help of the RISC-V community, then to seek input from the wider GCC and Clang developer communities for extensions or changes beyond the current set of command-line options supported by GCC.

See the issues list to discuss any of the problems or TODO items described in this document.

This document is currently targeted at toolchain implementers and developers, but over time we hope it will also become a useful reference for RISC-V toolchain users.

See also

• RISC-V user-level ISA specification (Document Version 20191213)
• RISC-V ELF psABI specification
• RISC-V Assembly Programmer's Manual
• GCC RISC-V option documentation

Specifying the target ISA with -march

The compiler and assembler both accept the -march flag to specify the target ISA, e.g. rv32imafd. The abbreviation g can be used to represent either IMAFD (when targeting RISC-V ISA specification version 2.2 or earlier) or IMAFD_Zicsr_Zifencei (version 20190608 or later) base and extensions, e.g. -march=rv64g. A target -march which includes floating point instructions implies a hardfloat calling convention, but can be overridden using the -mabi flag (see the next section).

The ISA subset naming conventions are described in Chapter 27 of the RISC-V user-level ISA specification. However, tools do not currently follow this specification (input is case sensitive, ...).

If the 'C' (compressed) instruction set extension is targeted, the compiler will generate compressed instructions where possible.

Issues for consideration

• Whether riscv32 and riscv64 should be accepted as synonyms for rv32 and rv64.
• Whether the -march string should be parsed case insensitively.
• Exposing the ability to specify version numbers for a target extension.
• Specifying non-standard extensions. The ISA specification suggests naming such as rv32gXfirstext_Xsecondext. In GCC or Clang it would be more conventional to give a string such as rv32g+firstext+secondext.
• Whether ordering should be enforced on the ISA string (e.g. currently rv32imafd is accepted by GCC but rv32iamfd is not).

Specifying the target ABI with -mabi

RISC-V compilers support the following ABIs, which can be specified using -mabi:

• ilp32: int, long, pointers are 32-bit. GPRs and the stack are used for parameter passing.
• ilp32f: int, long, pointers are 32-bit. GPRs, 32-bit FPRs, and the stack are used for parameter passing.
• ilp32d: int, long, pointers are 32-bit. GPRs, 64-bit FPRs and the stack are used for parameter passing.
• lp64: long, pointers are 64-bit. GPRs and the the stack are used for parameter passing.
• lp64f: long, pointers are 64-bit. GPRs, 32-bit FPRs, and the stack are used for parameter passing.
• lp64d: long, pointers are 64-bit. GPRs, 64-bit FPRs, and the stack are used for parameter passing.

See the RISC-V ELF psABI for more information on these ABIs.

The default value for -mabi is system dependent. For cross-compilation, both -march and -mabi should be specified. An error will be produced for impossible combinations of -march and -mabi such as -march=rv32i and -mabi=ilp32f.

Issues for consideration

• Should the -mabi string be parsed case insensitively?
• How should the RV32E ABI be specified? ilp32e?

Specifying the target code model with -mcmodel

The target code model indicates constraints on symbols which the compiler can exploit these constraints to generate more efficient code. Two code models are currently defined for RISC-V:

• -mcmodel=medlow. The program and its statically defined symbols must lie within a single 2GiB address range, between the absolute addresses -2GiB and +2GiB. lui and addi pairs are used to generate addresses.
• -mcmodel=medany. The program and its statically defined symbols must lie within a single 4GiB address range. auipc and addi pairs are used to generate addresses.

TODO: interaction with PIC.

Issues for consideration

• It has been proposed to deprecate the medlow code model and rename medany to medium.

Disassembler (objdump) behaviour

A RISC-V ELF binary is not currently self-describing, in the sense that it doesn't contain enough information to determine which variant of the RISC-V architecture is being targeted. GNU objdump will currently attempt disassemble any instruction whose encoding matches one of the standard RV32/RV64GC extensions.

objdump will default to showing pseudoinstructions and ABI register names. The numeric disassembler argument can be used to use architectural register names such as x10, while the no-aliases disassembler argument will ensure only canonical instructions rather than pseudoinstructions or aliases are printed. These arguments are specified using -M, e.g. -M numeric or -M numeric,no-aliases.

Perhaps surprisingly, the disassembler will default to hiding the difference between compressed (16-bit) instructions and their 32-bit equivalent. e.g. c.addi sp, -16 will be printed as addi sp, sp, -16.

Issues for consideration

• The current GNU objdump behaviour will not provide useful results for cases where non-standard extensions are implemented which reuse some of the standard extension's encoding space. Making RISC-V ELF files self-describing (as discussed here) would avoid this problem.
• Would it be useful to have separate flags that control the printing of pseudoinstructions and whether compressed instructions are printed directly or not?

Assembler behaviour

See the RISC-V Assembly Programmer's Manual for details on the syntax accepted by the assembler.

The assembler will produce compressed instructions whenever possible if the targeted RISC-V variant includes support for the 'C' compressed instruction set.

Issues for consideration

• There is currently no way to enable support for the 'C' ISA extension, but to disable the automatic 'compression' of instructions.

C/C++ preprocessor definitions

• __riscv: defined for any RISC-V target. Older versions of the GCC toolchain defined __riscv__.
• __riscv_xlen: 32 for RV32 and 64 for RV64.
• __riscv_float_abi_soft, __riscv_float_abi_single, __riscv_float_abi_double: one of these three will be defined, depending on target ABI.
• __riscv_cmodel_medlow, __riscv_cmodel_medany: one of these two will be defined, depending on the target code model.
• __riscv_mul: defined when targeting the 'M' ISA extension.
• __riscv_muldiv: defined when targeting the 'M' ISA extension and -mno-div has not been used.
• __riscv_div: defined when targeting the 'M' ISA extension and -mno-div has not been used.
• __riscv_atomic: defined when targeting the 'A' ISA extension.
• __riscv_flen: 32 when targeting the 'F' ISA extension (but not 'D') and 64 when targeting 'FD'.
• __riscv_fdiv: defined when targeting the 'F' or 'D' ISA extensions and -mno-fdiv has not been used.
• __riscv_fsqrt: defined when targeting the 'F' or 'D' ISA extensions and -mno-fdiv has not been used.
• __riscv_compressed: defined when targeting the 'C' ISA extension.

Issues for consideration

• What should the naming convention be for defines that indicate support for non-standard extensions?
• What additional information could/should be exposed via preprocessor defines?

Specifying stack alignment

The default stack alignment is 16 bytes in RV32I and RV64I, and 4 bytes on RV32E. There is not currently a way to specify an alternative stack alignment, but the -mpreferred-stack-boundary and -mincoming-stack-boundary flags supported by GCC on X86 could be adopted.

Save restore support

The save restore optimization is enabled through the option -msave-restore and reduces the amount of code in the prologue and epilogue by using library functions instead of inline code to save and restore callee saved registers. The library functions are provided in the emulation library and have the following signatures:

• void __riscv_save_<N>(void)
• void __riscv_restore_<N>(void)
• void __riscv_restore_tailcall_<N>(void *tail /* passed in t1 */) (LLVM/compiler-rt only)

<N> is a value between 0 and 12 and corresponds to the number of registers between s0 and s11 that are saved/restored. The return address register ra is always included in the registers saved and restored.

The __riscv_save_<N> functions are called from the prologue, using t0 as the link register to avoid clobbering ra. They allocate stack space for the registers and then save ra and the appropriate number of registers from s0-s11. The __riscv_restore_<N> functions are tail-called from the epilogue. They restore the saved registers, deallocate the stack space for the register, and then perform a return through the restored value of ra.

__riscv_restore_tailcall_<N> are additional entry points used when the epilogue of the called function ends in a tail-call. Unlike __riscv_restore_<N> these are also provided the address of the function which was originally tail-called as an argument, and after restoring registers they make a tail-call through that argument instead of returning. Note that the address of the function to tail-call is provided in register t1, which differs from the normal calling convention.

As of November 2021 the additional tail-call entry points are only implemented in compiler-rt, and calls will only be generated by LLVM when the option -mllvm -save-restore-tailcall is specified.

Conventions for vendor extensions

Support for custom instruction set extensions are an important part of RISC-V, with large encoding spaces reserved of vendor extensions.

However, there are no official guidelines on naming the mnemonics. This section defines guidelines which vendors are expected to follow if upstreaming support for their extensions. Although vendor-provided toolchains are free to make different choices, they are strongly urged to align with these guidelines in order to ensure there is a straightforward path for upstreaming in the future.

NOTE: Open source toolchain maintainer has final say on accepting vendor extension, comply with this conventions isn't guarantee upstream will accept.

Vendor extension naming scheme

According to the RISC-V ISA spec, non-standard extensions are named using a single X followed by an alphabetical name and an optional version number.

To make it easier to identify and prevent naming conflict, vendor extensions should start with a vendor name, which could be an abbreviation of the full name.

For example:

• XVentanaCondOps from Ventana
• Xsfcflushdlone from SiFive

Assembly mnemonic

In order to avoid confusion between standard extension and other vendor extensions, instruction mnemonics from vendor extensions must have a prefix corresponding to the vendor's name.

The vendor prefix should be at least two letters long

e.g. sf. for SiFive, vt. for Ventana. No central registration with RISC-V International or elsewhere is required before the prefix is used.

NOTE: Although no centralized registration is required, vendors should add the vendor prefix to the table IF vendors are interested to upstream their extension to open source toolchain like LLVM or GNU toolchain.

Vendors should also aim to follow the conventions used for naming mnemonics in the ratified base ISA and extensions (e.g. the use of 'w', 'd', 'u', and 's' suffixes).

List of vendor prefixes

Vendor	Prefix	URL
Open Hardware Group	cv	https://www.openhwgroup.org/
SiFive	sf	https://www.sifive.com/
T-Head	th	https://www.t-head.cn/
Ventana Micro Systems	vt	https://www.ventanamicro.com/
Nuclei	xl	https://nucleisys.com/

• NOTE: Vendor prefixes are case-insensitive.
• NOTE: The Nuclei instruction prefix xl is an abbreviation of "XinLai", which is the Chinese pronunciation of Nuclei(芯来).

NOTE: OpenHW cores are all branded as CORE-V, hence the prefix.

List of vendor extensions

Vendor	Name	Version	ISA Document
OpenHW	Xcvalu	1.0.0	CORE-V Instruction Set Extensions
OpenHW	Xcvbi	1.0.0	CORE-V Instruction Set Extensions
OpenHW	Xcvbitmanip	1.0.0	CORE-V Instruction Set Extensions
OpenHW	Xcvelw	1.0.0	CORE-V Instruction Set Extensions
OpenHW	Xcvhwlp	1.0.0	CORE-V Instruction Set Extensions
OpenHW	Xcvmac	1.0.0	CORE-V Instruction Set Extensions
OpenHW	Xcvmem	1.0.0	CORE-V Instruction Set Extensions
OpenHW	Xcvsimd	1.0.0	CORE-V Instruction Set Extensions
SiFive	XSFVCP	1.0	SiFive Vector Coprocessor Interface Software Specification
T-Head	XTheadCmo	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadBa	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadBb	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadBs	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadCondMov	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadFMemIdx	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadFmv	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadInt	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadMac	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadMemPair	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadMemIdx	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
T-Head	XTheadSync	1.0	T-Head ISA extension specification
Ventana	XVentanaCondOps	1.0	VTx-family custom instructions

NOTE: Vendor extension names are case-insensitive, CamelCase is used here for readability.

NOTE: Additional information on the CORE-V ISA extensions can be found in the CORE-V ISA Extension Naming specification, and in the draft CORE-V Builtin Function specification.

TODO

• -mdiv, -mno-div, -mfdiv, -mno-fdiv, -msave-restore, -mno-save-restore, -mstrict-align, -mno-strict-align, -mexplicit-relocs, -mno-explicit-relocs

Appendix: Exposing a vendor-specific extension across the toolchain

TODO.