RISC-V

Palmer Dabbelt, SiFive

COPYRIGHT 2018 SIFIVE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

 Why Instruction Set Architecture matters
• Why can’t Intel sell mobile chips?
– 99%+ of mobile phones/tablets are based on ARM’s v7/v8 ISA
• Why can’t ARM partners sell servers?
– 99%+ of laptops/desktops/servers are based on the AMD64 ISA (over 95%+
built by Intel)
• How can IBM still sell mainframes?
– IBM 360 is the oldest surviving ISA (50+ years)

ISA is the most important interface in a computer system

ISA is where software meets hardware
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 Open Software/Standards Work!
Field Standard Free, Open Impl. Proprietary Impl.
Networking Ethernet, TCP/IP Many Many

OS POSIX Linux, FreeBSD M/S Windows

Compilers C gcc, LLVM Intel icc, ARMcc
Databases SQL MySQL, PostgresSQL Oracle 12C, M/S DB2

Graphics OpenGL Mesa3D M/S DirectX

ISA ?????? ----------- x86, ARM, IBM360

• Why not have successful free & open standards and free & open
implementations, like other fields?
• Dominant proprietary ISAs are not great designs
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 What is RISC-V?
• A high-quality, license-free, royalty-free RISC ISA specification
originally designed at UC Berkeley
• Standard maintained by the non-profit RISC-V Foundation
• Suitable for all types of computing system, from microcontrollers
to supercomputers
• Numerous proprietary and open-source cores
• Experiencing rapid uptake in industry and academia
• Supported by a growing shared software ecosystem
• A work in progress…

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 RISC-V Reader
• Authored by Andrew and Dave
– Andrew Waterman: SiFive co-founder and
co-inventor of the RISC-V ISA
– Dave Patterson: UC Berkeley professor,
co-author of “Computer Organization and
Design”, and co-inventor of RISC-V
• “An Open Architecture Atlas”
– Concise introduction and reference
– Aimed at embedded systems programmers,
students, and the curious

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Origin of RISC-V

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 RISC-V Origins

• In 2010, after many years and many projects using MIPS, SPARC,
and x86 as the bases of research at Berkeley, it was time to
choose an ISA for next set of projects
• Obvious choices: x86 and ARM

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 Intel x86 “AAA” Instruction
• ASCII Adjust After Addition
• AL register is default source and destination

• If the low nibble is > 9 decimal, or the auxiliary carry flag AF = 1,

then
– Add 6 to low nibble of AL and discard overflow
– Increment high byte of AL
– Set CF and AF
• Else
– CF = AF = 0

• Single byte instruction

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 ARM v7 LDMIAEQ Instruction
LDMIAEQ SP!, {R4-R7, PC}

• LoaD Multiple, Increment-Address

• Writes to 7 registers from 6 loads
• Only executes if EQ condition code is set
• Writes to the PC (a conditional branch)
• Can change instruction sets

• Idiom for "stack pop and return from a function call"

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 RISC-V Origin Story
• x86 impossible – IP issues, too complex
• ARM mostly impossible – no 64-bit, IP issues, complex
• So we started “3-month project” in summer 2010 to develop our
own clean-slate ISA
– Principal designers: Andrew Waterman, Yunsup Lee, Dave Patterson, Krste
Asanovic
• Four years later, we released the frozen base user spec
– First public specification released in May 2011
– Several publications, many tapeouts, lots of software along the way

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 Static Code Size
• RISC-V is now the smallest ISA for 32- and 64-bit addresses
• All results are with the same GCC compiler and options

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 Dynamic Bytes Fetched
• RV64GC is lowest overall in dynamic bytes fetched

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 Silicon Implementations

Hurricane-1

Hurricane-2

CRAFT

Raven, Hurricane: ST 28nm FDSOI

BROOM
SWERVE, BROOM: TSMC 28nm
EOS: IBM 45nm SOI, CRAFT: 16nm TSMC

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 DIY Chip Tapeout Effort

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 RISC-V Software

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 There’s a lot of software!
From: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer.dabbelt@eecs.berkeley.edu>
To: config-patches@gnu.org
Subject: config.sub patch for RISC-V
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 19:20:31 -0700
Message-Id: <1410402032-9184-1-git-send-email-palmer.dabbelt@eecs.berkeley.edu>
X-Mailer: git-send-email 1.8.5.5

This patch provides support for the RISC-V ISA: http://riscv.org/

Not yet upstreamed ports of the binutils, GCC, LLVM, glibc, and Linux
exist for RISC-V, and a number of hardware implementations exist --
more more information can be seen at http://riscv.org . We'd like to
start getting RISC-V recognized by configure so it's easier for people
to start porting stuff.

Thanks!

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Current State of RISC-V

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 RISC-V Foundation

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 RISC-V Specifications
• User Mode ISA Specification
– RV32I/RV64I: ALU, branches, and memory
– M extension for multiplication
– A extension for atomics
– F and D extensions for single and double precision floating-point
– C extension for compressed instructions (16-bit)
• Privileged Mode ISA Specification
– Supervisor mode
– Hypervisor mode
– Machine mode
• External Debug Specification
– Debug machine-mode software over JTAG

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 RISC-V Weak Memory Model

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 RISC-V Linux Kernel Port
● Upstream Kernel boots
○ Upstream boots on QEMU

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 GNU-Based Toolchains
● binutils, GCC: May, 2017
● glibc: February, 2018
○ only supports rv64i-based ISAs
● newlib: August, 2017
● “Probably not a compiler bug”

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 Open Source Hardware
● Fedora runs on open source hardware
● Reproduced open-source FPGA shell
○ http://github.com/sifive/freedom

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 Open Standards Work!
• Kito Cheng (Andes Technology): GCC and newlib
• Jim Wilson (SiFive): binutils and GCC
• Darius Rad (Bluespec): glibc
• Andrew Waterman (SiFive): binutils, GCC, and glibc
• DJ Delorie (RedHat): glibc

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 Zeyhpr
● http://docs.zephyrproject.org/boards/riscv32/index.html
● Upstream support for HiFive1
● Zephyr SDK comes with RISC-V toolchains
● Used in a real product
○ http://badge.antmicro.com/
● Released 1.13.0 recently

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 Fedora
● https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V

● Self hosting
○ HiFive Unleashed
○ QEMU
● Build farms on HW

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 Debian
● https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V

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 OpenEmbedded/Yocto
● https://github.com/riscv/meta-riscv
● Port is in good shape
○ Supported upstream, runs X
○ Works on HiFive Unleashed and QEMU
● Khem Raj gave a talk at ELC
○ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdsmjqWJmfc

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 SiFive’s HiFive Unleashed

● 1.5GHz Quad Core on 28nm

● 2MiB L2 cache and 64-bit DDR4
● ChipLink board-to-board interconnect
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 The State of RISC-V Software

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 Getting Started
● http://sifive.com/blog
○ “Last Week in RISC-V”
● sw-dev@groups.riscv.org
● #riscv on freenode
● Per-project mailing lists
○ Most are upstream
○ linux-riscv@lists.infradead.org
○ linux-qemu@nongnu.org
○ binutils, GCC, glibc, GDB at FSF

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