RISC-V can do PC-relative jumps with a 32bit range using the following
two instructions:
auipc t0, imm20 ; t0 = PC + imm20 * 2^12
jalr ra, t0, imm12 ; ra = PC + 4, PC = t0 + imm12
Crucially both the 20bit immediate imm20 and the 12bit immediate imm12
are treated as two's-complement signed values. For this reason the
immediates are usually calculated like this:
..where offset is the signed offset from the auipc instruction. When
the 11th bit of offset is 0 the addition of 0x800 doesn't change the top
20 bits and imm12 considered positive. When the 11th bit is 1 the carry
of the addition by 0x800 means imm20 is one higher, but since imm12 is
then considered negative the two's complement representation means it
all cancels out nicely.
However, this addition by 0x800 (2^11) means an offset greater than or
equal to 2^31 - 2^11 would overflow so imm20 is considered negative and
result in a backwards jump. Similarly the lower range of offset is also
moved down by 2^11 and hence the true 32bit range is