jim-wilson
commented
4 years ago Those comments are all referring to the fact that riscv-tools used to contain a broken compiler that was generating bogus compiler bug reports, which was a major problem for me, the compiler maintainer. But the compiler was removed, so that problem has been fixed.
There is still the problem that no one is actively maintaining riscv-tools. It used to be that rocket-chip included riscv-tools, and the only time anyone ever updated riscv-tools was when rocket-chip was broken and needed a fix merged into riscv-tools. But now I think that rocket-chip no longer uses riscv-tools, and hence no one is updating it anymore. I see no updates since April, when the compiler was removed.
As for the submodules, riscv-pk has been deprecated and replaced with opensbi, though it may still useful for some applications. I think the others are still being maintained, it is just that no one is pulling those updates into riscv-tools, making riscv-tools pretty useless. Vector extension support was added to riscv-isa-sim for instance, but it isn't in riscv-tools.
towoe
There are some comments in issues https://github.com/riscv/riscv-tools/issues/290#issuecomment-536127889 and https://github.com/riscv/riscv-tools/issues/278#issuecomment-469447363 which say riscv-tools should not be used. In the case that this is correct, it might be good to add a note to the README stating that status. I can create a PR for that, but do not want to presume the repo condition.