Toolchain release size is excessive

[maxgerhardt]

The riscv-toolchain-15-x64-win.zip artefact is a whopping 1.09 GB although it's essentially compiled for only one RISC-V architecture set (rv32imac_zicsr_zifencei_zaamo_zalrsc_zba_zbb_zbkb_zbs). The top 10 biggest binaries in the archive are

$ find . -type f -exec du -h {} + | sort -rh | head -n 10
858M    ./libexec/gcc/riscv32-unknown-elf/15.1.0/cc1plus.exe
824M    ./libexec/gcc/riscv32-unknown-elf/15.1.0/cc1.exe
795M    ./libexec/gcc/riscv32-unknown-elf/15.1.0/lto1.exe
795M    ./bin/riscv32-unknown-elf-lto-dump.exe
308M    ./bin/riscv32-unknown-elf-gdb.exe
17M     ./libexec/gcc/riscv32-unknown-elf/15.1.0/lto-wrapper.exe
16M     ./riscv32-unknown-elf/bin/ld.exe
16M     ./riscv32-unknown-elf/bin/ld.bfd.exe
16M     ./bin/riscv32-unknown-elf-ld.exe
16M     ./bin/riscv32-unknown-elf-ld.bfd.exe

This seems extremely excessive. Compare that to the xpack repo (https://github.com/xpack-dev-tools/riscv-none-elf-gcc-xpack/releases/download/v14.2.0-3/xpack-riscv-none-elf-gcc-14.2.0-3-win32-x64.zip), the whole toolchain is 300 MB and that one supports 31 RISC-V variants (rv32e .. riv64imf_zicsr). Its riscv-none-elf-gdb.exe binary is a meager 8.42 MB instead of 308 MB.

Something is really not right here. Do you not strip the debug symbols from the produced binaries maybe? This toolchain download should be extreeeemly thin.

[maxgerhardt]

Simply running strip with the -g -S -d --strip-debug Remove all debugging symbols & sections option on it drops the filesize of GDB from 308 MB to 13 MB. And the binary still works the same. Jesus.

$ cp ./bin/riscv32-unknown-elf-gdb.exe bin/slim-gdb.exe
$ strip -g -S -d bin/slim-gdb.exe
$ ls -lh bin/*gdb*
$ ls -lh bin/*gdb*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 max max 308M Aug  8 15:03 bin/riscv32-unknown-elf-gdb.exe
-rwxrwxrwx 1 max max  13M Aug 22 16:25 bin/slim-gdb.exe

When doing this to all binaries, the re-zipped toolchain is now 137 MB big, not 1.09 GB.

[maxgerhardt]

FYI I have stripped and fixed versions of the toolchains (e.g. with respect to #18) in https://github.com/maxgerhardt/toolchain-riscv-rp2350/releases/tag/15.1.0.

[will-v-pi]

It looks like an --enable-strip option was added recently to the Risc-V toolchain repo riscv-collab/riscv-gnu-toolchain@99c9bec - we will look into enabling that