RISC-V formal ISA Specification

Copyright © Evgeny Ukhanov

This is a formal (and executable) specification for the RISC-V ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), written in F# purely functional style. We deliberately choose an "extremely elementary" implementation of F# to make it readable and usable by wide audience who do not know F# and who do not plan to learn F#.

This is a work-in-progress, one of several similar concurrent efforts within the ISA Formal Specification Technical Group constituted by The RISC-V Foundation (https://riscv.org). We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions.

Content

• Features & Current status
• Reading the code
• How to build and run it on RISC-V binaries
  • Install .NET SDK
  • Make the application executable
  • Run the application executable
• How to Contribute
• References
• Licence

Features & Current status

• Supports the following features (or in active development state)
  • Base instruction set: RV32I
  • Tests RV32I
  • Base instruction set: RV64I
  • Tests RV64I
  • Standard extension M (integer multiply/divide)
  • Tests for Standard extension M RV32/RV64
  • Standard extension A (atomic memory ops)
  • Tests for Standard extension A RV32/RV64
• Features under development
  • Standard extension C (Compressed 16-bit instructions)
  • Standard extension F (Single-precision floating point)
  • Standard extension D (Double-precision floating point)
  • Privilege Level M (Machine)
  • Privilege Level U (User)
  • Privilege Level S (Supervisor)
    • Virtual Memory schemes SV32, SV39 and SV48
• Application can be executed as a F# program flexible with CLI (command line interface) support, which in turn executes RISC-V ELF binaries. This is a sequential interpretation: one-instruction-at-a-time, sequential memory model.
• Tests passing for RISC-V under development:
  • Basic instruction flow
  • rv32ui-p-*, rv64ui-p-* (Base instruction set)
  • rv32um-p-*, rv64um-p-* (M extension)
  • rv32ua-p-*, rv64ua-p-* (A extension)
  • rv32uc-p-*, rv64uc-p-* (C extension)

Reading the code

We expect that many people might use this as a reading reference (whether or not they build and execute it) to clarify their understanding of RISC-V ISA semantics.

Main part for reading Specification:

• Decode*.fs

  Decodes contain decoders for specific instructions set and notified with instruction/extension set symbol. For example DecodeI.fs

• Execute*.fs

  Executes contain executions for specific instructions set and notified with instruction/extension set symbol. For example ExecuteI.fs

• Utilities:

  • CLI.fs

    Contain helper function and types for building effective CLI commands and options.

  • Bits.fs

    Basic type specific functions for manipulations with bits.

  • Run.fs

    Basic Run flow - fetch, decode, execute, logging execution flow.

• Architecture

  • Arch.fs

    Basic architecture types for RISC-V specification.

  • MachineState.fs

    Basic type and functions described RISC-V machine state.

• Main app

  • Program.fs

  Main application to execute RISC-V simulator/emulator.

• Test

  • Test/*.fs

    Contain unit-tests for instructions set and extensions

  • Test/asm/

    Contain Assembler test programs for manual testing RISC-V CPI implementation. It depend on risc-v toolchain and it has special auto-build Makefile.

How to build and run it on RISC-V binaries

Application can be executed as a sequential RISC-V simulator (sequential, one-instruction-at-a-time semantics), by building and executing it as a standard F# program.

Supported OS:

• Linux
• Windows
• MacOS

Supported .NET SDK:

• .NET SDK 2.2
• .NET SDK 3.0

Install .NET SDK

For Windows preferred way to use Visual Studio.

Other examples will be for Linux. Please follow to instruction https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download

For Ubuntu:

$ wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/packages-microsoft-prod.deb -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-3.0

To check installation:

$ dotnet --version

will tell you what version of dotnet you have.

Make the application executable

You can build the application executable with:

$ dotnet build

Run the application executable

Most simple way to run immediately run (without additional build command) to see command-line options on the executable:

$ dotnet run -- --help

If you run the application without option:

$ dotnet run

you'll receive error message:

Wrong parameters put --help to get more information

Example to run specific ISA with extensions, verbosity output and ELF file for execution in RISC-V CPI simulator:

$ dotnet run -- -A rv32i -v myapp.elf

How to Contribute

Please read file CONTRIBUTING.md

References

• github ISA manual: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual
• RISC-V specification: https://riscv.org/specifications/
• RISC-V Formal Verification Framework: https://github.com/SymbioticEDA/riscv-formal

Licence

MIT License