RISCstar Toolchain for RISC-V

The RISCstar toolchain is a pre-compiled family of GNU toolchains for RISC-V developers. It supports the entire RISC-V ecosystem, from the latest 64-bit application processors, right down to tiny RV32E microcontrollers. It is carefully engineered to support a wide variety of host architectures and Linux distributions (including common enterprise distributions).

The RISCstar toolchain is free to download and use.

Toolchain variants

The toolchain comes in three variants. The following summary will help you select the correct toolchain for you:

riscv64-none-linux-gnu – generates code for 64-bit Linux systems based on the GNU C library. Use this for general GNU/Linux development tasks (including kernel builds).
riscv64-none-linux-musl+qemu – generates code for 64-bit Linux systems using the musl C library for convenient static linking. Use this for specialist Linux development tasks where static linking is preferred. This variant is bundled with qemu-riscv64 allowing static binaries to be tested, even on x86-64 and AArch64 hosts.
riscv32-none-elf – generates code for both 32- and 64-bit microcontrollers. Can be used either for bare-metal programming (using the bundled newlib C library) or to compile an embedded RTOS.

Host requirements

The toolchain is available for three different host architectures:

All RISCstar toolchains require GNU/Linux. Windows users can use WSL2 or a virtual machine to provide this. macOS users, including those with Apple Silicon, should use a virtual machine.

The toolchain binaries are designed to run on a wide variety of host GNU/Linux distributions including Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu and more. The RISCstar toolchain manages its dependencies carefully and the current version should work on any glibc-based distribution that is newer than the following examples.

See the download box below for minimum versions for older toolchain releases.

Learn more

A more detailed introduction to the toolchain and some of the engineering that went into it can be found on the RISC-V International blog post announcing the first public release of the toolchain.

Support

We use the RISCstar toolchain in-house at RISCstar and are proud of our work. We love to hear when people find it useful and happily listen to suggestions for changes or requests for new features in the next release. If you have any comments, questions, or just something you want to discuss then we invite you to contribute to the toolchain section of our community forums. The forums are a great place to meet other toolchain users as well as the occasional RISCstar engineer!

We made this toolchain free to download and use. It comes with no warranty and, although our engineers participate in forum discussions, we don’t guarantee a reply to each and every topic. If you have specific needs related to toolchain services or support contacts, please Contact Us to discuss further.

Downloads

16.1-r1 (July 2026)

For x86-64 hosts:

For AArch64 hosts:

For RISC-V (RVA23U64 and later) hosts:

Complete corresponding source code:

15.2-r1 (October 2025)

For x86-64 hosts:

For AArch64 hosts:

For RISC-V (RVA23U64 and later) hosts:

Complete corresponding source code:

The 15.2-r1 toolchain binaries for x86-64 and AArch64 are designed to run on any glibc-based GNU/Linux distribution released after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (June 2014).

15.1-r1 (July 2025)

For x86-64 hosts:

For AArch64 hosts:

For RISC-V (RV64GC and later) hosts:

Complete corresponding source code:

The 15.1-r1 toolchain binaries for x86-64 and AArch64 are designed to run on any glibc-based GNU/Linux distribution released after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (June 2014).

14.2-r2 (December 2024)

For x86-64 hosts:

For AArch64 hosts:

For RISC-V (RV64GC and later) hosts:

Complete corresponding source code:

The 14.2-r2 toolchain binaries for x86-64 and AArch64 are designed to run on any glibc-based GNU/Linux distribution released after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (June 2014).