Sedna RISC-V Emulator

Sedna is a 64-bit RISC-V emulator written purely in Java. It implements all extensions necessary to be considered "general purpose" plus supervisor mode, meaning it can boot Linux. At the time of writing (2020/12/06) Sedna passes all tests in the RISC-V test suite. It also supports serializing and deserializing machine state.

Structure

The code layout is relatively flat, with different parts of the emulator living in their respective packages. Here are some notable ones.

Package	Description
li.cil.sedna.device	Non-ISA specific device implementations.
li.cil.sedna.devicetree	Utilities for constructing device trees.
li.cil.sedna.elf	An ELF loader, currently only used to load tests.
li.cil.sedna.fs	Virtual file system layer for VirtIO filesystem device.
li.cil.sedna.instruction	Instruction loader and decoder generator.
li.cil.sedna.memory	Memory map implementation and utilities.
li.cil.sedna.riscv	RISC-V CPU and devices (CLINT, PLIC).

RISC-V Extensions

Sedna implements the G meta extension, i.e. the general purpose computing set of extensions: rv64imacfd and Zifencei. For the uninitiated, this means:

• i: basic 64-bit integer ISA.
• m: integer multiplication, division, etc.
• a: atomic operations.
• c: compressed instructions.
• f: single precision (32-bit) floating-point operations.
• d: double precision (64-bit) floating-point operations.
• Zifencei: memory fence for instruction fetch.

This comes with a couple of caveats:

• The FENCE and FENCE.I instructions are no-ops and atomic operations do not lock underlying memory. Multi-core setups will behave incorrectly.
• Floating-point operations have been reimplemented in software for flag correctness. Meaning they're slow.

Instructions and decoding

Sedna uses run-time byte-code generation to create the decoder switch used by the instruction interpreter. This makes it very easy to add new instructions and to experiment with different switch layouts to improve performance. The instruction loader and switch generator are technically general purpose, i.e. they have no direct dependencies on the RISC-V part of this project. However, there are some assumptions on how instructions are defined and processed baked into their design.

The current set of supported RISC-V instructions is declared in this file.

Instruction implementations are defined in the RISC-V CPU class.

Endianness

The emulator presents itself as a little-endian system to code running inside it. This should also work correctly on big-endian host systems, but has not been tested.

Tests

Sedna tests ISA conformity using the RISC-V test suite. The tests are run using a simple JUnit test runner. The compiled test binaries are included in this repository and can be found here.

Maven

Sedna can be included into a project via the Github Package Repository. See the documentation for more information on how to set that up. In short, you'll want to add your username and a public access token into your ~/.gradle/gradle.properties and use those variables in your repository declaration. Note that the public access token will need read:packages permissions.

For example, using Gradle:

repositories {
  maven {
    url = uri("https://maven.pkg.github.com/fnuecke/sedna")
    credentials {
      username = project.findProperty("gpr.user") ?: System.getenv("USERNAME")
      password = project.findProperty("gpr.key") ?: System.getenv("TOKEN")
    }
  }
}

dependencies {
  implementation 'li.cil.ceres:sedna:2.0.0'
}