RISC-V Workshop

This page is meant to describe each of the talks at the RISC-V workshop for those who are familiar with RISC-V. If you are not familiar with the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), this page is probably not for you and you can learn about it here.

The RISC-V workshop took place in Barcelona from 7-9 May 2018. Please find more information and the slides on the RISC-V Workshop website.

Tutorial Day, 7 May

RISC-V ISA & Foundation Overview

Rick O'Connor, RISC-V Foundation

Foundation manages specifications and trademarks for showing a device is RISC-V compliant. NVIDIA and Western Digital will release cores

Base ISA

Andrew Waterman, SiFive

He described the following specs:

More details can be found on the RISC-V specification website.

Privileged ISA

Allen Baum

RISC-V has 3 execution modes: machine, supervisor and user. The supervisor and user modes can also be virtualized in case of hypervisors. Interestingly, they said that although the specification v1.10 is still draft there is a low chance of changes being made that are not backward compatible. Please find more information on the RISC-V specification website or the workshop slides.

Memory Model

Daniel Lustig, NVIDIA

They have defined a memory model called RISC-V Weak Memory Order (RVWMO), which is easier to implement than total store ordering and easier for programmers than multi-copy-atomicity. In a nutshell RVWMO describes 13 patterns of two processor events for which program order is preserved. For more details on the 13 patterns please see the slides 26-35 of the talk.

The RISC-V Vector ISA

Roger Espasa

This spec is still in draft 32 additional vector registers with fixed number of elements. These registers can be interpreted as scalars, vectors or 2d matrices. Many additional instructions, for details please see the tutorial slides.

RISC-V Debug Spec Tutorial

Gajinder Panesar, UltraSoC

Basic features: select harts, halt/resume, abstract commands, program buffer, stepper etc. Debug adds a new execute mode that is above M (machine) mode Please find more information in the RISC-V debug spec GitHub.

Formal Specification

Thomas Bourgeat, MIT

They work on a formal specification of the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) and it is written in Haskell It is an alternative to the L3 and Sail models among others For more detail see the RISC-V Semantics GitHub

LLVM for RISC-V

Alex Bradbury lowRISC

This was a very nice tutorial in which he showed how to add custom instructions to the LLVM compiler. There is a quick/dirty solution of using a .insn directive and more complex solutions involving adding a .td file with using codegen for generating tests. I recommend looking at the slides on supporting custom instruction set extensions.

Workshop Day 1, 8 May

State of the Union

Krste Asonavic, SiFive

Very ambitions goal of wanting to be the industry standard ISA He stated that the following standards are in progress: formal, hyper-visor, vector, crypto, J (dynamic translation), P (packed SIMD) etc. They have a book for introducing RISC-V.

Vector ISA Proposal Update

Roger Espasa, Esperanto

The specification is nearly ready to be closed. For more details please see the slides on the Vector ISA Proposal Update.

State of RISC-V Software

Palmer Dabbelt, SiFive

There is a lot of activity for RISC-V software:

Formal Specification Technical Group

Rishiyur Nikhil, Bluespec

See formal specification section. Next steps: publish formal specification, merge formal ISA specification with memory model

RISC-V Memory Consistency Model

Dan Lustig, NVIDIA

See memory model section

Keynote: software drives hardware

Robert Oshana, VP Software Engineering at NXP

Robert talked about NXP's experience with using RISC-V in an industrial setting They like RISC-V because they can leverage the open-source ISA so that they can focus on their unique extensions Integrating RISC-V with ARM was initially a hard problem.

Keynote:enabling a new era of open data-centric computing architectures

Martin Fink, CTO at Western Digital

This presentation has pretty slides and cool buzzwords, I encourage you to take a look. Western Digital is doing RISC-V because it needs an open interface (not because of the ISA specifically) Patents play an increasing role for hardware design (as opposed to copyright in software)

Trace32 debugging

Markus Goehrle, Lauterbach Engineering

Trace32 is Linux-aware and multi-core debugging software that works with any RISC-V compliant debug modules One big problem that they have is that there are quite a few custom debug implementations that are not compliant with the RISC-V debug spec

GDB in RISC-V

Jeremy Bennett, Embecosm

GDB has basic bare metal support for RISC-V since 6 March 2018

A common Software Development environment for many core RISC-V HW and virtual platforms

Simon Davidmann, Imperas

Imperas is a simulation solution that is:

HiFive

Yunsup Lee, SiFive

HiFive is a multi core RISC-V Linux dev board, which costs about $1000 SiFive allows you to make your own RISC-V SoC on their website and order it

HiFive unleashed expansion options and capabilities

Ted Marena, Microsemi

Mi-V focused on RTOS and is an extension board for the HiFive unleashed It adds peripheral support like PCIE and HDMI to HiFive

Simulating Heterogenous Multi-node RISC-V systems

Michael Gielda, Antmicro

Another simulation solution allowing multiple operating systems to be booted Find more information in their presentation

Debian Gnu/Linux Port for RISC-V 64 bit

Manuel Fernandez Montecelo, Debian

About 80% of Debian packages have been ported to RISC-V so far. Not yet available are: Firefox (no Rust) & Chromium (only x86 & ARM) If you're interested in checking the status of a debian package you can use the buildd website.

Fedora on RV

Richard Jones, Red Hat

Fedora is also progressing in their port. One interesting point that they made is that the RISC-V community should NOT couple too tightly Linux, also other OS's like Windows need to run if the ISA is to be successful

smallest RISC-V device

Seiji Munetoh, IBM

These guys built on top of the PULPino project and they were designing for next generation embedded devices. In the end they made a chip that is 300um by 250um with 2kB SRAM

The MareNostrum

Sergi Girona, Barcelona Supercomputing Center

This is a super computer installed in the university's chapel and has 13.7 Pflops/s. Besides Intel they also have emerging architectures like: Power9+NIVIDIA, ARMv8, KNH Some other stats: 394 TB RAM, 830 TB SSD, 1.5 MW, 14 PB disk storage They plan to include RISC-V in the future

Workshop Day 2, May 9

Fast interrupts

Krste Asanovic, SiFive

The current interrupt scheme disables interrupts while the handler is running, but some embedded applications require nested interrupts. For example, there might be an interrupt that needs handling before the one currently being handled. Additionally the new fast interrupt scheme would allow interrupt priorities. They have started up a working group to enable fast interrupts.

RISC-V DSP (P) Extension

Chuan-Hua Chang, Andes

Andes produces SoCs for diverse applications. They are going to head the DSP task group, which will be responsible for defining RISC-V extension for digital signal processing (DSP) applications.

Security task group

Richard Newell, Microsemi

Originally the security task group consisted of two projects: micro-controller trusted execution environments and cryptography. Now these are separate task groups and there is a new security charing committee. The new committee is headed by Helena Handschuh and Joseph Kiniry.

Formal Assurance for RV

Daniel Zimmerman, Galois

This talk was all about how to formally assure that an implementation fulfills the specification. The talk introduced LANDO which is a domain specific language that specifies architecture, correctness properties and security properties Lastly, the talk also talked about security and the difficulty in measuring security of an implementation

How to not specify things

Clifford Wolf, Symbiotic EDA

This talk argued that sometimes you don't want to specify all corner cases because it will make certain hardware less efficient OK ways to specify a hole in your system:

Foundational HPC Systems for 2020 and Beyond

Steven Wallach, Micron

This talk was about the RV128 specification and he introduced the idea of having the first 64 bits being an object identifier and the last 64 bits as the byte address.

Keynote: Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Mateo Valero, BSC

Memory bandwidth is more important than CPU power in supercomputing nowadays EU is currently not a big player in super computing as compared to US, Japan and China. EPI: European processor initiative wants to change that and they're pushing this to be RISC-V, although current proposal is ARM

Securing RISC-V processors from time speculation

Christopher Celio, Esperanto

This talk went into the detail of what is needed to do a cache side-channel attack and how to avoid them. Interesting ideas like partitioning the caches and selectively flushing them on a context switch. For details read the slides of this presentation.

Use of RISC-V on Pixel Visual Core

Matt Cockrell, Google

Matt talked about how they evaluated RISC-V for use in the image processing unit of their Pixel phone. They chose the PULP project as a base and he mentioned the importance of running lint tools and version control.

AndesCore

Charlie Su, Andes Technologies

AndeStar V5 architecture improves on standard RISC-V

Serious player building chips for real customers

Processor trace

Gajinder Panesar, UltraSoC

Sometimes debugging is not always possible and then tracing is necessary. For example a branch trace will define the complete control flow graph. At the moment this is custom built by UltraSoC, but they will set up a task group to standardize

RISC-V meet 22FDX

Pasquale Davide Schiavone, ETH Zurich Sanjay Charagulla, Global Foundries

PULP: open source ultra low power u-controller platform. They've built a RISC-V processor, but also the infrastructure around it like the memory system. Global foundries;

Ariane

Florian Zaruba, ETH Zurich

Open source 64 bit RISC-V with privileged instructions.

RISC-V support for persistent memory systems

Matheus Ogleari, Western Digital

Persisten memory is about having more control over what is written to disk, which means ways to:

An alternative is to use a bit in the page table to say uncacheable, but this is less flexible.

Hybrid threading processor for sparse data kernels

Tony Brewer, Micron

Problem: sparse data sets exceeding cache size Solution: hybrid threading, which moves threads around to the data that they need Micron is using RISC-V for prototyping hybrid threading with custom instructions

PULP-base platforms are helping security research

Frank Gurkaynak, ETH

This talk was about how PULP allows researchers to study hardware security. He described an implementation of leakage resilient cryptography and a way for control flow protection by using cryptographic sponges.

RISC-V virtual platform for early RISC-V embedded software developments

Lee Moore, Imperas & Ashling

Virtual platform accelerate software development, because you can simulate instructions before the hardware is ready