Suport for GD32VF (RISCV) series.

[richardclli]

I can contribute, need somebody give me some ideas where to start.

I already PlatformIO projects works for GD32VF series. Just want to unified to a single opensource and active platform.

[maxgerhardt]

I'm not sure about this -- wouldn't we be doing duplicate work that https://github.com/sipeed/platform-gd32v has already done? What are is that platform missing, feature wise? I see the RISC chips as very different from the ARM chips and we would basically have different basic chip types in one platform, which I've not yet seen in PlatformIO.

[richardclli]

The main problem is the sdk for GD32VF103 seems not maintained anymore (https://github.com/riscv-mcu/GD32VF103_Firmware_Library) in which this platform linked to it, bug fixes pull request is not processed anyway.

And for compatibility, the code will run in many cases for chips GD32VF103 / GD32E103 / GD32F103 / GD32C103, as the firmware library has 99% compatible API.

[maxgerhardt]

And when we have SPL support, won't people also be asking for Arduino support through https://github.com/sipeed/Longduino? Or should we adapt https://github.com/CommunityGD32Cores/ArduinoCore-GD32 to also support the RISC-V chips?

[djix123]

I think its a little more tricky than saying the SPL is 99% compatible. The compiler chain and compiler command line options are different and so is the start up assembler file. Effectively it would require install two different tool-chains under one platform and then having to differentiate between them in the build scripts. Not sure that's a good idea.

Also the SPL is maintained: according to this site https://www.gd32mcu.com/en/download/7?kw=GD32VF1 it was last updated July 12, 2022.

[maxgerhardt]

The SPL is indeed maintened from the Gigadevice side, but the sipeed paltform references

https://github.com/sipeed/platform-gd32v/blob/master/platform.json#L43-L48

and that was last update a whopping 3 years ago (https://registry.platformio.org/tools/platformio/framework-gd32vf103-sdk/versions), so richard has a point there.

But we could still do a PR into the sipeed platform, which Ivan seems to maintain according to the last commit.

But then there still wouldn't be general support for all possible GD32VF103 chip variants.

[djix123]

I did actually start doing that: https://github.com/djix123/framework-gd32vf103-sdk but didn't get around to submitting a PR!

[richardclli]

I have worked out something as well, but.... I think it is better to do it in https://github.com/CommunityGD32Cores for completeness of support for all GD32 chips.

And for the platform, it will be no harm to separate 2 platforms for different tool chains, and after taken care the underlying layer, the upper layer (e.g. Arduino) maybe able to support both platforms easily.