rve/README.md

1.3 KiB

A simple RISC-V emulator

This is a toy emulator for RISC-V, made for educational purposes. The goal is to have a base rv32i instruction set (the bare minimum) plus a M-extension for division and multiplication. In theory, it should be enough to execute simple C programs compiled with GCC and sprinkled with a few linker scripts. Of course, no libc because there's no OS.

Compiling and running

You'd need nix package manager in order to build the project. This is because installing cross-toolchain to compile an example project is difficult, and I don't know of other ways except nix that make it easy.

If you don't have it, install it like this:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install

Now, to build the emulator:

nix develop

eval "$configurePhase"
ninja

As a result you should get an executable called rve

Cross-toolchain and an example program in C

There is an example program which you can compile. It requires some custom toolchain so currently not built with CMake. To compile it:

cd example
make

As a result, you'll get an example.raw binary. To execute it:

./rve ../example/example.raw

The expected output of the example program is 269.