WebRISC-V

WebRISC-V is a web-based graphical pipelined datapath simulation environment built for the RISC-V instruction set architecture. It is suitable for teaching how assembly level code is executed on the RISC-V pipelined architecture and for illustrating the Pipeline Architectural Elements.

WebRISC-V is online and ready for use

Publication

If you would like to cite WebRISC-V, please use this reference:

@InProceedings{Giorgi19-wcae,
  author = {Giorgi, Roberto and Mariotti, Gianfranco},
  title = {{WebRISC-V}: a Web-Based Education-Oriented  RISC-V Pipeline Simulation Environment},
  booktitle = "ACM Workshop on Computer Architecture Education (WCAE-19)",
  address = "Phoenix, AX, (USA)",
  pages = "1-6",
  rkey = "",
  surl = "",
  month = "jun",
  year = "2019",
  url = "http://www.dii.unisi.it/~giorgi/papers/Giorgi19-wcae.pdf",
  doi = "10.1145/3338698.3338894",
  isbn= "978-1-4503-6842-1/19/06",
  dxdo="http://doi.acm.org/",
  scopus="2-s2.0-8507127341"
}

Table of Contents

• WebRISC-V
  • Features
  • Local Installation

Features

• 5-stage Graphical Pipeline 64-bit Simulator
  • Pipeline Schema taken from Patterson's 'Computer Organization and Design: RISC-V Edition' and enhanced
  • Visualize every Architectural Element and the Data and Control paths
  • Execute with or without the Forwarding and the Delay Slot
  • Keep track of the execution in the Pipeline
    • Instruction Memory | Data Memory | Registers
  • Pipeline Table to show the execution trace
  • Console to interact with the execution through implemented syscalls
• Supported instructions are the full RV64I Base Instruction Set (excluding: fence) and RV64M Standard Multiplication Extension
  • List of supported instruction with small descriptions of the underlying function visible on click
  • RISC-V Assembly small examples available

Local Installation

You can install WebRISC-V on a local server. The reference Installation has been done on the Linux distro UBUNTU 18.04LTS (it works also on the Ubuntu shell in Windows-10).

• To install the web-server with the PHP language included issue the following commands:

  sudo apt -y update && sudo apt -y install apache2 php libapache2-mod-php
  sudo apt -y install php-gmp
  sudo ufw allow 'Apache'           (ufw may fail if you don't have ufw... just ignore it)
  a2enmod php7.2
  sudo systemctl status apache2     (alternatively you may want to run:
                                    sudo service apache2 start && sudo service apache2 status )

  --> you should see something like:
    apache2.service - The Apache HTTP Server
    Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/apache2.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
    Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service.d
           └─apache2-systemd.conf
    Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-05-15 10:12:29 UTC; 1min ago
    Main PID: 4867 (apache2)
    Tasks: 52 (limit: 1101)
    CGroup: /system.slice/apache2.service
          ├─4868 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
          ├─4869 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
          └─4870 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

• To test if the web server with PHP works, open your local web-broswer (e.g., firefox) and open this page:
  http://localhost

At this point you should see: "Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page"

• To install the WebRISC-V software:

  cd /var/www/html
  sudo wget http://www.dii.unisi.it/~giorgi/WebRISC-V.tgz
  sudo tar xf WebRISC-V.tgz
  chmod -R 655 .
  chown www-data:www-data .

• in the browser open:
  http://localhost/WebRISC-V

And here it is ready for use.