This repository contains the Rocket chip generator necessary to instantiate
the RISC-V Rocket Core. For more information on Rocket Chip, please consult our technical report.
Table of Contents
Quick instructions for those who want to dive directly into the details without knowing exactly what’s in the repository.
The rocket-tools repository known to work with rocket-chip is noted
in the file riscv-tools.hash. However, any recent rocket-tools should work.
You can build rocket-tools as follows:
$ git clone https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-tools
$ cd rocket-tools
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ export RISCV=/path/to/install/riscv/toolchain
$ export MAKEFLAGS="$MAKEFLAGS -jN" # Assuming you have N cores on your host system
$ ./build.sh
$ ./build-rv32ima.sh (if you are using RV32).
Install Necessary Dependencies
You may need to install some additional packages to use this repository.
Rather than list all dependencies here, please see the appropriate section of the READMEs for each of the subprojects:
In either case, you can run a set of assembly tests or simple benchmarks
(Assuming you have N cores on your host system):
$ make -jN run-asm-tests
$ make -jN run-bmark-tests
To build a C simulator that is capable of VCD waveform generation:
$ cd emulator
$ make debug
And to run the assembly tests on the C simulator and generate waveforms:
$ make -jN run-asm-tests-debug
$ make -jN run-bmark-tests-debug
To generate FPGA- or VLSI-synthesizable Verilog (output will be in vsim/generated-src):
$ cd vsim
$ make verilog
Keeping Your Repo Up-to-Date
If you are trying to keep your repo up to date with this GitHub repo,
you also need to keep the submodules and tools up to date.
$ # Get the newest versions of the files in this repo
$ git pull origin master
$ # Make sure the submodules have the correct versions
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
If rocket-tools version changes, you should recompile and install rocket-tools according to the directions in the rocket-tools/README.
$ cd rocket-tools
$ ./build.sh
$ ./build-rv32ima.sh (if you are using RV32)
What’s in the Rocket chip generator repository?
The rocket-chip repository is a meta-repository that points to several
sub-repositories using Git submodules.
Those repositories contain tools needed to generate and test SoC designs.
This respository also contains code that is used to generate RTL.
Hardware generation is done using Chisel,
a hardware construction language embedded in Scala.
The rocket-chip generator is a Scala program that invokes the Chisel compiler
in order to emit RTL describing a complete SoC.
The following sections describe the components of this repository.
Git Submodules
Git submodules allow you to keep a Git repository as a subdirectory of another Git repository.
For projects being co-developed with the Rocket Chip Generator, we have often found it expedient to track them as submodules,
allowing for rapid exploitation of new features while keeping commit histories separate.
As submoduled projects adopt stable public APIs, we transition them to external dependencies.
Here are the submodules that are currently being tracked in the rocket-chip repository:
hardfloat
(https://github.com/ucb-bar/berkeley-hardfloat):
Hardfloat holds Chisel code that generates parameterized IEEE 754-2008 compliant
floating-point units used for fused multiply-add operations, conversions
between integer and floating-point numbers, and conversions between
floating-point conversions with different precision.
torture
(https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-torture):
This module is used to generate and execute constrained random instruction streams that can
be used to stress-test both the core and uncore portions of the design.
Scala Packages
In addition to submodules that track independent Git repositories,
the rocket-chip code base is itself factored into a number of Scala packages.
These packages are all found within the src/main/scala directory.
Some of these packages provide Scala utilities for generator configuration,
while other contain the actual Chisel RTL generators themselves.
Here is a brief description of what can be found in each package:
amba
This RTL package uses diplomacy to generate bus implementations of AMBA protocols, including AXI4, AHB-lite, and APB.
config
This utility package provides Scala interfaces for configuring a generator via a dynamically-scoped
parameterization library.
coreplex
This RTL package generates a complete coreplex by gluing together a variety of components from other packages,
including: tiled Rocket cores, a system bus network, coherence agents, debug devices, interrupt handlers, externally-facing peripherals,
clock-crossers and converters from TileLink to external bus protocols (e.g. AXI or AHB).
devices
This RTL package contains implementations for peripheral devices, including the Debug module and various TL slaves.
diplomacy
This utility package extends Chisel by allowing for two-phase hardware elaboration, in which certain parameters
are dynamically negotiated between modules. For more information about diplomacy, see this paper.
groundtest
This RTL package generates synthesizable hardware testers that emit randomized
memory access streams in order to stress-tests the uncore memory hierarchy.
jtag
This RTL package provides definitions for generating JTAG bus interfaces.
regmapper
This utility package generates slave devices with a standardized interface for accessing their memory-mapped registers.
rocket
This RTL package generates the Rocket in-order pipelined core,
as well as the L1 instruction and data caches.
This library is intended to be used by a chip generator that instantiates the
core within a memory system and connects it to the outside world.
tile
This RTL package contains components that can be combined with cores to construct tiles, such as FPUs and accelerators.
tilelink
This RTL package uses diplomacy to generate bus implementations of the TileLink protocol. It also contains a variety
of adapters and protocol converters.
system
This top-level utility package invokes Chisel to elaborate a particular configuration of a coreplex,
along with the appropriate testing collateral.
unittest
This utility package contains a framework for generateing synthesizable hardware testers of individual modules.
util
This utility package provides a variety of common Scala and Chisel constructs that are re-used across
multiple other packages,
Other Resources
Outside of Scala, we also provide a variety of resources to create a complete SoC implementation and
test the generated designs.
bootrom
Sources for the first-stage bootloader included in the BootROM.
csrc
C sources for use with Verilator simulation.
emulator
Directory in which Verilator simulations are compiled and run.
project
Directory used by SBT for Scala compilation and build.
regression
Defines continuous integration and nightly regression suites.
scripts
Utilities for parsing the output of simulations or manipulating the contents of source files.
vsim
Directory in which Synopsys VCS simulations are compiled and run.
vsrc
Verilog sources containing interfaces, harnesses and VPI.
Extending the Top-Level Design
See this description of how to create
you own top-level design with custom devices.
How should I use the Rocket chip generator?
Chisel can generate code for three targets: a high-performance
cycle-accurate Verilator, Verilog optimized for FPGAs, and Verilog
for VLSI. The rocket-chip generator can target all three backends. You
will need a Java runtime installed on your machine, since Chisel is
overlaid on top of Scala. Chisel RTL (i.e.
rocket-chip source code) is a Scala program executing on top of your
Java runtime. To begin, ensure that the ROCKETCHIP environment variable
points to the rocket-chip repository.
Before going any further, you must point the RISCV environment variable
to your rocket-tools installation directory. If you do not yet have
rocket-tools installed, follow the directions in the
rocket-tools/README.
export RISCV=/path/to/install/riscv/toolchain
Otherwise, you will see the following error message while executing any
command in the rocket-chip generator:
*** Please set environment variable RISCV. Please take a look at README.
1) Using the high-performance cycle-accurate Verilator
Your next step is to get the Verilator working. Assuming you have N
cores on your host system, do the following:
$ cd $ROCKETCHIP/emulator
$ make -jN run
By doing so, the build system will generate C++ code for the
cycle-accurate emulator, compile the emulator, compile all RISC-V
assembly tests and benchmarks, and run both tests and benchmarks on the
emulator. If Make finished without any errors, it means that the
generated Rocket chip has passed all assembly tests and benchmarks!
You can also run assembly tests and benchmarks separately:
$ make -jN run-asm-tests
$ make -jN run-bmark-tests
To generate vcd waveforms, you can run one of the following commands:
$ make -jN run-debug
$ make -jN run-asm-tests-debug
$ make -jN run-bmark-tests-debug
Or call out individual assembly tests or benchmarks:
$ make output/rv64ui-p-add.out
$ make output/rv64ui-p-add.vcd
Now take a look in the emulator/generated-src directory. You will find
Chisel generated Verilog code and its associated C++ code generated by
Verilator.
$ ls $ROCKETCHIP/emulator/generated-src
DefaultConfig.dts
DefaultConfig.graphml
DefaultConfig.json
DefaultConfig.memmap.json
freechips.rocketchip.system.DefaultConfig
freechips.rocketchip.system.DefaultConfig.d
freechips.rocketchip.system.DefaultConfig.fir
freechips.rocketchip.system.DefaultConfig.v
$ ls $ROCKETCHIP/emulator/generated-src/freechips.rocketchip.system.DefaultConfig
VTestHarness__1.cpp
VTestHarness__2.cpp
VTestHarness__3.cpp
...
Also, output of the executed assembly tests and benchmarks can be found
at emulator/output/*.out. Each file has a cycle-by-cycle dump of
write-back stage of the pipeline. Here’s an excerpt of
emulator/output/rv64ui-p-add.out:
The first [1] at cycle 483, core 0, shows that there’s a
valid instruction at PC 0x2138 in the writeback stage, which is
0x002081b3 (add s1, ra, s0). The second [1] tells us that the register
file is writing r3 with the corresponding value 0x7fff7fff. When the add
instruction was in the decode stage, the pipeline had read r1 and r2
with the corresponding values next to it. Similarly at cycle 484,
there’s a valid instruction (lui instruction) at PC 0x213c in the
writeback stage. At cycle 485, there isn’t a valid instruction in the
writeback stage, perhaps, because of a instruction cache miss at PC
0x2140.
2) Mapping a Rocket core to an FPGA
You can generate synthesizable Verilog with the following commands:
$ cd $ROCKETCHIP/vsim
$ make verilog CONFIG=DefaultFPGAConfig
The Verilog used for the FPGA tools will be generated in
vsim/generated-src. Please proceed further with the directions shown in
the README
of the freedom repository. You can also run Rocket Chip on Amazon EC2 F1
with FireSim.
If you have access to VCS, you will be able to run assembly
tests and benchmarks in simulation with the following commands
(again assuming you have N cores on your host machine):
$ cd $ROCKETCHIP/vsim
$ make -jN run CONFIG=DefaultFPGAConfig
The generated output looks similar to those generated from the emulator.
Look into vsim/output/*.out for the output of the executed assembly
tests and benchmarks.
3) Pushing a Rocket core through the VLSI tools
You can generate Verilog for your VLSI flow with the following commands:
$ cd $ROCKETCHIP/vsim
$ make verilog
Now take a look at vsim/generated-src, and the contents of the
Top.DefaultConfig.conf file:
The conf file contains information for all SRAMs instantiated in the
flow. If you take a close look at the $ROCKETCHIP/Makefrag, you will see
that during Verilog generation, the build system calls a $(mem_gen)
script with the generated configuration file as an argument, which will
fill in the Verilog for the SRAMs. Currently, the $(mem_gen) script
points to vsim/vlsi_mem_gen, which simply instantiates behavioral
SRAMs. You will see those SRAMs being appended at the end of
vsim/generated-src/Top.DefaultConfig.v. To target vendor-specific
SRAMs, you will need to make necessary changes to vsim/vlsi_mem_gen.
Similarly, if you have access to VCS, you can run assembly tests and
benchmarks with the following commands (again assuming you have N cores
on your host machine):
$ cd $ROCKETCHIP/vsim
$ make -jN run
The generated output looks similar to those generated from the emulator.
Look into vsim/output/*.out for the output of the executed assembly
tests and benchmarks.
How can I parameterize my Rocket chip?
By now, you probably figured out that all generated files have a configuration
name attached, e.g. DefaultConfig. Take a look at
src/main/scala/system/Configs.scala. Search for NSets and NWays defined in
BaseConfig. You can change those numbers to get a Rocket core with different
cache parameters. For example, by changing L1I, NWays to 4, you will get
a 32KB 4-way set-associative L1 instruction cache rather than a 16KB 2-way
set-associative L1 instruction cache.
Further down, you will be able to see two FPGA configurations:
DefaultFPGAConfig and DefaultFPGASmallConfig. DefaultFPGAConfig inherits from
BaseConfig, but overrides the low-performance memory port (i.e., backup
memory port) to be turned off. This is because the high-performance memory
port is directly connected to the high-performance AXI interface on the ZYNQ
FPGA. DefaultFPGASmallConfig inherits from DefaultFPGAConfig, but changes the
cache sizes, disables the FPU, turns off the fast early-out multiplier and
divider, and reduces the number of TLB entries (all defined in SmallConfig).
This small configuration is used for the Zybo FPGA board, which has the
smallest ZYNQ part.
Towards the end, you can also find that DefaultSmallConfig inherits all
parameters from BaseConfig but overrides the same parameters of
WithNSmallCores.
Now take a look at vsim/Makefile. Search for the CONFIG variable.
By default, it is set to DefaultConfig. You can also change the
CONFIG variable on the make command line:
$ cd $ROCKETCHIP/vsim
$ make -jN CONFIG=DefaultSmallConfig run-asm-tests
Or, even by defining CONFIG as an environment variable:
$ export CONFIG=DefaultSmallConfig
$ make -jN run-asm-tests
This parameterization is one of the many strengths of processor
generators written in Chisel, and will be more detailed in a future blog
post, so please stay tuned.
To override specific configuration items, such as the number of external interrupts,
you can create your own Configuration(s) and compose them with Config’s ++ operator
class WithNExtInterrupts(nExt: Int) extends Config {
(site, here, up) => {
case NExtInterrupts => nExt
}
}
class MyConfig extends Config (new WithNExtInterrupts(16) ++ new DefaultSmallConfig)
Then you can build as usual with CONFIG=MyConfig.
Debugging with GDB
1) Generating the Remote Bit-Bang (RBB) Emulator
The objective of this section is to use GNU debugger to debug RISC-V programs running on the emulator in the same fashion as in Spike.
For that we need to add a Remote Bit-Bang client to the emulator. We can do so by extending our Config with JtagDTMSystem, which will add a DebugTransportModuleJTAG to the DUT and connect a SimJTAG module in the Test Harness. This will allow OpenOCD to interface with the emulator, and GDB can interface with OpenOCD. In the following example we added this Config extension to the DefaultConfig:
class DefaultConfigRBB extends Config(
new WithJtagDTMSystem ++ new WithNBigCores(1) ++ new BaseConfig)
class QuadCoreConfigRBB extends Config(
new WithJtagDTMSystem ++ new WithNBigCores(4) ++ new BaseConfig)
To build the emulator with DefaultConfigRBB configuration we use the command:
rocket-chip$ cd emulator
emulator$ CONFIG=DefaultConfigRBB make
We can also build a debug version capable of generating VCD waveforms using the command:
emulator$ CONFIG=DefaultConfigRBB make debug
By default the emulator is generated under the name emulator-freechips.rocketchip.system-DefaultConfigRBB in the first case and emulator-freechips.rocketchip.system-DefaultConfigRBB-debug in the second.
2) Compiling and executing a custom program using the emulator
We suppose that helloworld is our program, you can use crt.S, syscalls.c and the linker script test.ld to construct your own program, check examples stated in riscv-tests. Note that test.ld loads the program at 0x80000000 so you will need to use -mcmodel=medany otherwise you will get relocation errors. See All Aboard, Part 4: The RISC-V Code Models for more details.
In our case we will use the following example:
char text[] = "Vafgehpgvba frgf jnag gb or serr!";
// Don't use the stack, because sp isn't set up.
volatile int wait = 1;
int main()
{
while (wait)
;
// Doesn't actually go on the stack, because there are lots of GPRs.
int i = 0;
while (text[i]) {
char lower = text[i] | 32;
if (lower >= 'a' && lower <= 'm')
text[i] += 13;
else if (lower > 'm' && lower <= 'z')
text[i] -= 13;
i++;
}
while (!wait)
;
}
First we can test if your program executes well in the simple version of emulator before moving to debugging in step 3 :
VCD output files can be obtained using the -debug version of the emulator and are specified using -v or --vcd=FILE arguments. A detailed log file of all executed instructions can also be obtained from the emulator, this is an example:
Please note that generated VCD waveforms and execution log files can be very voluminous depending on the size of the .elf file (i.e. code size + debugging symbols).
Please note also that the time it takes the emulator to load your program depends on executable size. Stripping the .elf executable will unsurprisingly make it run faster. For this you can use $RISCV/bin/riscv64-unknown-elf-strip tool to reduce the size. This is good for accelerating your simulation but not for debugging. Keep in mind that the HTIF communication interface between our system and the emulator relies on tohost and fromhost symbols to communicate. This is why you may get the following error when you try to run a totally stripped executable on the emulator:
$ ./emulator-freechips.rocketchip.system-DefaultConfig totally-stripped-helloworld
This emulator compiled with JTAG Remote Bitbang client. To enable, use +jtag_rbb_enable=1.
Listening on port 46529
warning: tohost and fromhost symbols not in ELF; can't communicate with target
To resolve this, we need to strip all the .elf executable but keep tohost and fromhost symbols using the following command:
More details on the GNU strip tool can be found here.
The interest of this step is to make sure your program executes well. To perform debugging you need the original unstripped version, as explained in step 3.
3) Launch the emulator
First, do not forget to compile your program with -g -Og flags to provide debugging support as explained here.
We can then launch the Remote Bit-Bang enabled emulator with:
./emulator-freechips.rocketchip.system-DefaultConfigRBB +jtag_rbb_enable=1 --rbb-port=9823 helloworld
This emulator compiled with JTAG Remote Bitbang client. To enable, use +jtag_rbb_enable=1.
Listening on port 9823
Attempting to accept client socket
You can also use the emulator-freechips.rocketchip.system-DefaultConfigRBB-debug version instead if you would like to generate VCD waveforms.
Please note that if the argument --rbb-port is not passed, a default free TCP port on your computer will be chosen randomly.
Please note also that when debugging with GDB, the .elf file is not actually loaded by the FESVR. In contrast with Spike, it must be loaded from GDB as explained in step 5. So the helloworld argument may be replaced by any dummy name.
4) Launch OpenOCD
You will need a RISC-V Enabled OpenOCD binary. This is installed with rocket-tools in $(RISCV)/bin/openocd, or can be compiled manually from riscv-openocd. OpenOCD requires a configuration file, in which we define the RBB port we will use, which is in our case 9823.
$ cat cemulator.cfg
interface remote_bitbang
remote_bitbang_host localhost
remote_bitbang_port 9823
set _CHIPNAME riscv
jtag newtap $_CHIPNAME cpu -irlen 5
set _TARGETNAME $_CHIPNAME.cpu
target create $_TARGETNAME riscv -chain-position $_TARGETNAME
gdb_report_data_abort enable
init
halt
Then we launch OpenOCD in another terminal using the command
$(RISCV)/bin/openocd -f ./cemulator.cfg
Open On-Chip Debugger 0.10.0+dev-00112-g3c1c6e0 (2018-04-12-10:40)
Licensed under GNU GPL v2
For bug reports, read
http://openocd.org/doc/doxygen/bugs.html
Warn : Adapter driver 'remote_bitbang' did not declare which transports it allows; assuming legacy JTAG-only
Info : only one transport option; autoselect 'jtag'
Info : Initializing remote_bitbang driver
Info : Connecting to localhost:9823
Info : remote_bitbang driver initialized
Info : This adapter doesn't support configurable speed
Info : JTAG tap: riscv.cpu tap/device found: 0x00000001 (mfg: 0x000 (<invalid>), part: 0x0000, ver: 0x0)
Info : datacount=2 progbufsize=16
Info : Disabling abstract command reads from CSRs.
Info : Disabling abstract command writes to CSRs.
Info : [0] Found 1 triggers
Info : Examined RISC-V core; found 1 harts
Info : hart 0: XLEN=64, 1 triggers
Info : Listening on port 3333 for gdb connections
Info : Listening on port 6666 for tcl connections
Info : Listening on port 4444 for telnet connections
A -d flag can be added to the command to show further debug information.
5) Launch GDB
In another terminal launch GDB and point to the elf file you would like to load then run it with the debugger (in this example, helloworld):
$ riscv64-unknown-elf-gdb helloworld
GNU gdb (GDB) 8.0.50.20170724-git
Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "--host=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --target=riscv64-unknown-elf".
Type "show configuration" for configuration details.
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>.
Find the GDB manual and other documentation resources online at:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/documentation/>.
For help, type "help".
Type "apropos word" to search for commands related to "word"...
Reading symbols from ./proj1.out...done.
(gdb)
Compared to Spike, the C Emulator is very slow, so several problems may be encountered due to timeouts between issuing commands and response from the emulator. To solve this problem, we increase the timeout with the GDB set remotetimeout command.
After that we load our program by performing a load command. This automatically sets the $PC to the _start symbol in our .elf file.
Now we can proceed as with Spike, debugging works in a similar way:
(gdb) print wait
$1 = 1
(gdb) print wait=0
$2 = 0
(gdb) print text
$3 = "Vafgehpgvba frgf jnag gb or serr!"
(gdb) c
Continuing.
^C
Program received signal SIGINT, Interrupt.
main (argc=0, argv=<optimized out>) at src/main.c:33
33 while (!wait)
(gdb) print wait
$4 = 0
(gdb) print text
$5 = "Instruction sets want to be free!"
(gdb)
Further information about GDB debugging is available here and here.
If used for research, please cite Rocket Chip by the technical report:
Krste Asanović, Rimas Avižienis, Jonathan Bachrach, Scott Beamer, David Biancolin, Christopher Celio, Henry Cook, Palmer Dabbelt, John Hauser, Adam Izraelevitz, Sagar Karandikar, Benjamin Keller, Donggyu Kim, John Koenig, Yunsup Lee, Eric Love, Martin Maas, Albert Magyar, Howard Mao, Miquel Moreto, Albert Ou, David Patterson, Brian Richards, Colin Schmidt, Stephen Twigg, Huy Vo, and Andrew Waterman, The Rocket Chip Generator, Technical Report UCB/EECS-2016-17, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, April 2016
Rocket Chip Generator 🚀
This repository contains the Rocket chip generator necessary to instantiate the RISC-V Rocket Core. For more information on Rocket Chip, please consult our technical report.
Table of Contents
Quick Instructions
Checkout The Code
Setting up the RISCV environment variable
To build the rocket-chip repository, you must point the RISCV environment variable to your rocket-tools installation directory.
The rocket-tools repository known to work with rocket-chip is noted in the file riscv-tools.hash. However, any recent rocket-tools should work. You can build rocket-tools as follows:
Install Necessary Dependencies
You may need to install some additional packages to use this repository. Rather than list all dependencies here, please see the appropriate section of the READMEs for each of the subprojects:
Building The Project
First, to build the C simulator:
Or to build the VCS simulator:
In either case, you can run a set of assembly tests or simple benchmarks (Assuming you have N cores on your host system):
To build a C simulator that is capable of VCD waveform generation:
And to run the assembly tests on the C simulator and generate waveforms:
To generate FPGA- or VLSI-synthesizable Verilog (output will be in
vsim/generated-src
):Keeping Your Repo Up-to-Date
If you are trying to keep your repo up to date with this GitHub repo, you also need to keep the submodules and tools up to date.
If rocket-tools version changes, you should recompile and install rocket-tools according to the directions in the rocket-tools/README.
What’s in the Rocket chip generator repository?
The rocket-chip repository is a meta-repository that points to several sub-repositories using Git submodules. Those repositories contain tools needed to generate and test SoC designs. This respository also contains code that is used to generate RTL. Hardware generation is done using Chisel, a hardware construction language embedded in Scala. The rocket-chip generator is a Scala program that invokes the Chisel compiler in order to emit RTL describing a complete SoC. The following sections describe the components of this repository.
Git Submodules
Git submodules allow you to keep a Git repository as a subdirectory of another Git repository. For projects being co-developed with the Rocket Chip Generator, we have often found it expedient to track them as submodules, allowing for rapid exploitation of new features while keeping commit histories separate. As submoduled projects adopt stable public APIs, we transition them to external dependencies. Here are the submodules that are currently being tracked in the rocket-chip repository:
Scala Packages
In addition to submodules that track independent Git repositories, the rocket-chip code base is itself factored into a number of Scala packages. These packages are all found within the src/main/scala directory. Some of these packages provide Scala utilities for generator configuration, while other contain the actual Chisel RTL generators themselves. Here is a brief description of what can be found in each package:
Other Resources
Outside of Scala, we also provide a variety of resources to create a complete SoC implementation and test the generated designs.
Extending the Top-Level Design
See this description of how to create you own top-level design with custom devices.
How should I use the Rocket chip generator?
Chisel can generate code for three targets: a high-performance cycle-accurate Verilator, Verilog optimized for FPGAs, and Verilog for VLSI. The rocket-chip generator can target all three backends. You will need a Java runtime installed on your machine, since Chisel is overlaid on top of Scala. Chisel RTL (i.e. rocket-chip source code) is a Scala program executing on top of your Java runtime. To begin, ensure that the ROCKETCHIP environment variable points to the rocket-chip repository.
Before going any further, you must point the RISCV environment variable to your rocket-tools installation directory. If you do not yet have rocket-tools installed, follow the directions in the rocket-tools/README.
Otherwise, you will see the following error message while executing any command in the rocket-chip generator:
1) Using the high-performance cycle-accurate Verilator
Your next step is to get the Verilator working. Assuming you have N cores on your host system, do the following:
By doing so, the build system will generate C++ code for the cycle-accurate emulator, compile the emulator, compile all RISC-V assembly tests and benchmarks, and run both tests and benchmarks on the emulator. If Make finished without any errors, it means that the generated Rocket chip has passed all assembly tests and benchmarks!
You can also run assembly tests and benchmarks separately:
To generate vcd waveforms, you can run one of the following commands:
Or call out individual assembly tests or benchmarks:
Now take a look in the emulator/generated-src directory. You will find Chisel generated Verilog code and its associated C++ code generated by Verilator.
Also, output of the executed assembly tests and benchmarks can be found at emulator/output/*.out. Each file has a cycle-by-cycle dump of write-back stage of the pipeline. Here’s an excerpt of emulator/output/rv64ui-p-add.out:
The first [1] at cycle 483, core 0, shows that there’s a valid instruction at PC 0x2138 in the writeback stage, which is 0x002081b3 (add s1, ra, s0). The second [1] tells us that the register file is writing r3 with the corresponding value 0x7fff7fff. When the add instruction was in the decode stage, the pipeline had read r1 and r2 with the corresponding values next to it. Similarly at cycle 484, there’s a valid instruction (lui instruction) at PC 0x213c in the writeback stage. At cycle 485, there isn’t a valid instruction in the writeback stage, perhaps, because of a instruction cache miss at PC 0x2140.
2) Mapping a Rocket core to an FPGA
You can generate synthesizable Verilog with the following commands:
The Verilog used for the FPGA tools will be generated in vsim/generated-src. Please proceed further with the directions shown in the README of the freedom repository. You can also run Rocket Chip on Amazon EC2 F1 with FireSim.
If you have access to VCS, you will be able to run assembly tests and benchmarks in simulation with the following commands (again assuming you have N cores on your host machine):
The generated output looks similar to those generated from the emulator. Look into vsim/output/*.out for the output of the executed assembly tests and benchmarks.
3) Pushing a Rocket core through the VLSI tools
You can generate Verilog for your VLSI flow with the following commands:
Now take a look at vsim/generated-src, and the contents of the Top.DefaultConfig.conf file:
The conf file contains information for all SRAMs instantiated in the flow. If you take a close look at the $ROCKETCHIP/Makefrag, you will see that during Verilog generation, the build system calls a $(mem_gen) script with the generated configuration file as an argument, which will fill in the Verilog for the SRAMs. Currently, the $(mem_gen) script points to vsim/vlsi_mem_gen, which simply instantiates behavioral SRAMs. You will see those SRAMs being appended at the end of vsim/generated-src/Top.DefaultConfig.v. To target vendor-specific SRAMs, you will need to make necessary changes to vsim/vlsi_mem_gen.
Similarly, if you have access to VCS, you can run assembly tests and benchmarks with the following commands (again assuming you have N cores on your host machine):
The generated output looks similar to those generated from the emulator. Look into vsim/output/*.out for the output of the executed assembly tests and benchmarks.
How can I parameterize my Rocket chip?
By now, you probably figured out that all generated files have a configuration name attached, e.g. DefaultConfig. Take a look at src/main/scala/system/Configs.scala. Search for NSets and NWays defined in BaseConfig. You can change those numbers to get a Rocket core with different cache parameters. For example, by changing L1I, NWays to 4, you will get a 32KB 4-way set-associative L1 instruction cache rather than a 16KB 2-way set-associative L1 instruction cache.
Further down, you will be able to see two FPGA configurations: DefaultFPGAConfig and DefaultFPGASmallConfig. DefaultFPGAConfig inherits from BaseConfig, but overrides the low-performance memory port (i.e., backup memory port) to be turned off. This is because the high-performance memory port is directly connected to the high-performance AXI interface on the ZYNQ FPGA. DefaultFPGASmallConfig inherits from DefaultFPGAConfig, but changes the cache sizes, disables the FPU, turns off the fast early-out multiplier and divider, and reduces the number of TLB entries (all defined in SmallConfig). This small configuration is used for the Zybo FPGA board, which has the smallest ZYNQ part.
Towards the end, you can also find that DefaultSmallConfig inherits all parameters from BaseConfig but overrides the same parameters of WithNSmallCores.
Now take a look at vsim/Makefile. Search for the CONFIG variable. By default, it is set to DefaultConfig. You can also change the CONFIG variable on the make command line:
Or, even by defining CONFIG as an environment variable:
This parameterization is one of the many strengths of processor generators written in Chisel, and will be more detailed in a future blog post, so please stay tuned.
To override specific configuration items, such as the number of external interrupts, you can create your own Configuration(s) and compose them with Config’s ++ operator
Then you can build as usual with CONFIG=MyConfig.
Debugging with GDB
1) Generating the Remote Bit-Bang (RBB) Emulator
The objective of this section is to use GNU debugger to debug RISC-V programs running on the emulator in the same fashion as in Spike.
For that we need to add a Remote Bit-Bang client to the emulator. We can do so by extending our Config with JtagDTMSystem, which will add a DebugTransportModuleJTAG to the DUT and connect a SimJTAG module in the Test Harness. This will allow OpenOCD to interface with the emulator, and GDB can interface with OpenOCD. In the following example we added this Config extension to the DefaultConfig:
To build the emulator with
DefaultConfigRBB
configuration we use the command:We can also build a debug version capable of generating VCD waveforms using the command:
By default the emulator is generated under the name
emulator-freechips.rocketchip.system-DefaultConfigRBB
in the first case andemulator-freechips.rocketchip.system-DefaultConfigRBB-debug
in the second.2) Compiling and executing a custom program using the emulator
We suppose that
helloworld
is our program, you can usecrt.S
,syscalls.c
and the linker scripttest.ld
to construct your own program, check examples stated in riscv-tests. Note thattest.ld
loads the program at 0x80000000 so you will need to use-mcmodel=medany
otherwise you will get relocation errors. See All Aboard, Part 4: The RISC-V Code Models for more details.In our case we will use the following example:
First we can test if your program executes well in the simple version of emulator before moving to debugging in step 3 :
Additional verbose information (clock cycle, pc, instruction being executed) can be printed using the following command:
VCD output files can be obtained using the
-debug
version of the emulator and are specified using-v
or--vcd=FILE
arguments. A detailed log file of all executed instructions can also be obtained from the emulator, this is an example:Please note that generated VCD waveforms and execution log files can be very voluminous depending on the size of the .elf file (i.e. code size + debugging symbols).
Please note also that the time it takes the emulator to load your program depends on executable size. Stripping the .elf executable will unsurprisingly make it run faster. For this you can use
$RISCV/bin/riscv64-unknown-elf-strip
tool to reduce the size. This is good for accelerating your simulation but not for debugging. Keep in mind that the HTIF communication interface between our system and the emulator relies ontohost
andfromhost
symbols to communicate. This is why you may get the following error when you try to run a totally stripped executable on the emulator:To resolve this, we need to strip all the .elf executable but keep
tohost
andfromhost
symbols using the following command:More details on the GNU strip tool can be found here.
The interest of this step is to make sure your program executes well. To perform debugging you need the original unstripped version, as explained in step 3.
3) Launch the emulator
First, do not forget to compile your program with
-g -Og
flags to provide debugging support as explained here.We can then launch the Remote Bit-Bang enabled emulator with:
You can also use the
emulator-freechips.rocketchip.system-DefaultConfigRBB-debug
version instead if you would like to generate VCD waveforms.Please note that if the argument
--rbb-port
is not passed, a default free TCP port on your computer will be chosen randomly.Please note also that when debugging with GDB, the .elf file is not actually loaded by the FESVR. In contrast with Spike, it must be loaded from GDB as explained in step 5. So the
helloworld
argument may be replaced by any dummy name.4) Launch OpenOCD
You will need a RISC-V Enabled OpenOCD binary. This is installed with rocket-tools in
$(RISCV)/bin/openocd
, or can be compiled manually from riscv-openocd. OpenOCD requires a configuration file, in which we define the RBB port we will use, which is in our case9823
.Then we launch OpenOCD in another terminal using the command
A
-d
flag can be added to the command to show further debug information.5) Launch GDB
In another terminal launch GDB and point to the elf file you would like to load then run it with the debugger (in this example,
helloworld
):Compared to Spike, the C Emulator is very slow, so several problems may be encountered due to timeouts between issuing commands and response from the emulator. To solve this problem, we increase the timeout with the GDB
set remotetimeout
command.After that we load our program by performing a
load
command. This automatically sets the$PC
to the_start
symbol in our .elf file.Now we can proceed as with Spike, debugging works in a similar way:
Further information about GDB debugging is available here and here.
Contributors
Can be found here.
Attribution
If used for research, please cite Rocket Chip by the technical report:
Krste Asanović, Rimas Avižienis, Jonathan Bachrach, Scott Beamer, David Biancolin, Christopher Celio, Henry Cook, Palmer Dabbelt, John Hauser, Adam Izraelevitz, Sagar Karandikar, Benjamin Keller, Donggyu Kim, John Koenig, Yunsup Lee, Eric Love, Martin Maas, Albert Magyar, Howard Mao, Miquel Moreto, Albert Ou, David Patterson, Brian Richards, Colin Schmidt, Stephen Twigg, Huy Vo, and Andrew Waterman, The Rocket Chip Generator, Technical Report UCB/EECS-2016-17, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, April 2016