RISC-V truly is the RyanAir of processors: Oh, you want FP maths? That's an optional extra, did you check that when you booked? And was that single or double-precision, all optional extras at an extra charge. Atomic instructions, that's an extra too, have your credit card details handy. Multiply and divide? Yeah, extras. Now, let me tell you about our high-end customer options, packed SIMD and user-level interrupts, only for business class users. And then there's our first-class benefits, hypervisor extensions for big spenders, and even more, all optional extras.
So it's modular. This is normally considered a good thing. It means you don't have to pay for features you don't need.
The ISA is open so there's no greedy corporation trying to upsell you. I mean there's an implementation and die area cost for each extension but it's not being set at an artificial level by a monopolist.
It's a good thing in many cases but not if you're going to be running applications distributed as binaries. Maybe if we go the Gentoo route of everybody always recompiling everything for their own system?
Then you stick to RVA23, which is comparable to ARMv9 and x86-64v4.
But that means a port of Linux can’t be to RISC-V, it has to be to a specific implementation of RISC-V, or if sufficient (which seems still debatable) to a specific common RISC-V profile.
You can target the minimum instruction set and it'll run everywhere. Albeit very slowly. Perhaps you use a fat binary to get reasonable performance in most cases.
This isn't easy but it can be done (and it is being done on x86, despite constantly evolving variations of AVX).
Then x86_64 is the cable television service of processors. "Oh, you want channel 5? Then you have to buy this bundle with 40 other channels you will never watch, including 7 channels in languages you do not speak."
>Multiply and divide
And where it actually mattered they did not introduce a separate extension. Integer division is significantly more complex than multiplication, so it may make sense for low-end microcontrollers to implement in hardware only the latter.
There is Zmmul for multiplication-but-not-divide.
Yes, adding instructions to your ISA has a cost