Merging RISCVToolChain and BareMetal toolchains

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I recently discovered that we have two RISC-V toolchain classes in Clang that are intended to support baremetal development:

  1. RISCVToolChain is used when an existing GCC installation is present.
  2. BareMetal is used otherwise.

I think this creates an unnecessary maintenance overhead and increases confusion as evidenced by [clang] Enable --gcc-install-dir for RISCV baremetal toolchains by mihailo-stojanovic · Pull Request #71803 · llvm/llvm-project · GitHub. I don’t think that support for using an existing GCC installation is RISC-V specific and would be also beneficial to other targets supported by the BareMetal toolchain.

I would like to propose extending the BareMetal toolchain to support using an existing GCC installation, and then deprecating and removing the RISCVToolChain.

1 Like
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On a similar note I wondered why there is CSKYToolChain which from reading the initial commit ([Clang][CSKY] Add the CSKY target and compiler driver · llvm/llvm-project@97e4960 · GitHub) just sounds like a typical Linux on CSKY Toolchain that could be merged into Linux.cpp/Gnu.cpp and BareMetal support.

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I can’t speak for the RISCV toolchain itself, would very much like to see the functionality in the BareMetal toolchain so all targets that support it can benefit.

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This sounds fantastic to me.