Sail is a language for describing the instruction-set architecture (ISA) semantics of processors. Sail aims to provide a engineer-friendly, vendor-pseudocode-like language for describing instruction semantics. It is essentially a first-order imperative language, but with lightweight dependent typing for numeric types and bitvector lengths, which are automatically checked using Z3. It has been used for several papers, available from http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/sail/.
Given a Sail definition, the tool will type-check it and generate executable emulators, in C and OCaml, theorem-prover definitions for Isabelle, HOL4, and Coq, and definitions to integrate with our RMEM tool for concurrency semantics. This is all work in progress, and some theorem-prover definitions do not yet work for the more complex models; see the most recent papers and the ARMv8.5-A model for descriptions of the current state.
This repository contains the implementation of Sail, together with some Sail specifications and related tools.
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A manual, manual.pdf with source (in doc/)
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The Sail source code (in src/)
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Generated Isabelle snapshots of some ISA models, in snapshots/isabelle
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Documentation for generating Isabelle and working with the ISA specs in Isabelle in snapshots/isabelle/Manual.pdf
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A simple emacs mode with syntax highlighting (in editors/)
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A test suite for Sail (in test/)
Sail is currently being used for ARM, RISC-V, MIPS, CHERI-MIPS, IBM Power, and x86 models, variously ranging from full definitions to core user-mode fragments, and either here or in separate repositories:
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Sail ARMv8.3-A ISA model. This is the "public" model described in our POPL 2019 paper, now largely superseded by the above.
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Sail ARMv8-A ISA model, handwritten. This is a handwritten user-mode fragment.
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Sail IBM POWER ISA model, automatically generated from IBM XML documentation. This is a user-mode fragment.
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Sail x86 ISA model, handwritten. This is a handwritten user-mode fragment.
The hand-written ARMv8-A, IBM POWER, and x86 models are currently not in sync with the latest version of Sail, which is the (default) sail2 branch on Github. These and the RISC-V model are integrated with our RMEM tool for concurrency semantics.
See the following Sail wiki page for how to get pre-built binaries of Sail using OPAM.
See INSTALL.md for full details of how to build Sail from source with all the required dependencies.
editors/sail2-mode.el contains an Emacs mode for the most recent version of Sail which provides some basic syntax highlighting. editors/sail-mode.el contains an emacs mode for previous versions of the language.
The Sail implementation, in src/, as well as its tests in test/ and other supporting files in lib/ and language/, is distributed under the 2-clause BSD licence in the headers of those files and in src/LICENCE, with the exception of the library src/pprint, which is distributed under the CeCILL-C free software licence in src/pprint/LICENSE.
The generated parts of the ASL-derived ARMv8.3 model in aarch64/ are copyright ARM Ltd. See https://github.com/meriac/archex, and the README file in that directory.
The hand-written ARMv8 model, in arm/, is distributed under the 2-clause BSD licence in the headers of those files.
The x86 model in x86/ is distributed under the 2-clause BSD licence in the headers of those files.
The POWER model in power/ is distributed under the 2-clause BSD licence in the headers of those files.
The models in separate repositories are licensed as described in each.