[hajile]

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.

[MobiusHorizons]

Compiling the code is not the issue. The hard part is the system integration. Most notably the boot process and peripherals. It's not actually hard to compile code for any given ARM or x86 target. Even much less open ecosystems like IBM mainframes have free and open source compilers (eg GCC). The ISA is just how computation happens. But you have to boot the system, and get data in and out for the system to be actually useful, and pretty much all of that contains vendor specific quirks. Its really only the x86 world where that got so standardized across manufacturers, and that was mostly because people were initially trying to make compatible clones of the IBM PC.

[storus]

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.

[Findecanor]

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

[hajile]

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.