A Survey of the RISC-V Architecture Software Support

RISC-V is a novel open instruction set architecture that supports multiple platforms while maintaining simplicity and reliability. Despite its novelty, the software support for RISC-V has been increasing in the last years, given that popular tool-chains and operating systems already have support for RISC-V. However, although many works have been exploring the RISC-V software ecosystem, no work that raised the current state of software support for RISC-V is available. In this context, this survey reviews the contributions introduced in the last years to understand the RISC-V’s software ecosystem and its usage in both academic and industrial environments. We classified and evaluated the works into four main categories: fields of application, RISC-V implementations, software architecture, and deployment features. The primary goal of this research is to provide the community with a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art of RISC-V software support and identify and highlight the main contributions of recent works.