SEGGER’s Embedded Studio for RISC-V now comes with the SEGGER Linker in addition to the GNU linker. The SEGGER Linker has been developed from the ground up to create executables for Embedded Systems.

For RISC-V, it shrinks the size of the resulting programs by up to 15%, shortens link time, delivers a detailed map file, and provides more flexibility.

Based on the same code as the SEGGER Linker for ARM, which is well-proven in SEGGER’s leading integrated development environment “Embedded Studio for ARM”, it inherited a lot of noteworthy features, such as integrated integrity check generation with a number of algorithms (CRCs and hashes), the ability to automatically place code and data in non-contiguous regions, and prioritize data into fast memories.

To achieve this improvement in code density, the new RISC-V linker uses a combination of various optimization strategies. Such techniques include ordering code and data in the most efficient way to use short addressing modes, as well as replacing code sequences with more efficient ones, along with the use of spring-boarding technologies.