rocket-chip VS riscv-isa-manual

Hello. I'm looking into implementing RISC-V on an FPGA for a school project. The two repos I'm looking into using are the Ariane and RocketChip repos. Both look actively maintained, but RocketChip has more recent releases, and it's used by this other repo that creates a block design in Vivado with the RISC-V RTL. However, we would also like to be able to make changes to the core, and I'm afraid that scala/Chisel might be difficult to learn. Ariane looks like SystemVerilog while RocketChip is mostly Chisel. Does any have recommendations on which RISC-V repo would be good to use for a project?

You could do a trial build of an in-order Rocket RISC-V core [1] to see how much space it takes up.

[1] https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip

My definition of a RISC CPU is one that has a reduced instruction set. In other words, the category of CPU is defined by the size of the instruction set, not in how it is implemented. Consider for example RISC-V CPUs. These are defined by their open instruction set alone, in spite of the fact that many implementations of RISC-V CPUs exist: some pipelined, and some not.

More complex CPUs are typically completely out of scope for hand coding, therefore you can implement generators like: https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip

We don't have Sifive's specifically but we do have the open source cores they've historically used to design their cores: https://github.com/riscv-boom/riscv-boom https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip

This would allow you to experiment with your own chip or something like [the RocketChip generator](https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip).

https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip/blob/c7da610430f51b02ebda37f3d444674dc8f2adbf/src/main/scala/system/Configs.scala#L28

I don't know about the u74 specifically, but sifive does seem to invest in a open source risc-v core called rocket-chip.

https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual/releases

Regarding the recent "How to improve the RISC-V specification" post [0], I just wanted to point out, that the latest draft manual is already a great improvement. (see link above)

It includes a lot of the newly ratified extensions: bitmanip,zicond,vector,vector crypto, ...

And there are a bunch of included SAIL definitions for bitmanip and zicond, but other instructions are still missing the SAIL code. Most notably, the SAIL definitions from the RV32I/RV64I base isa are also missing.

I asked for the further SAIL integration plans here: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual/issues/1369

Here is an example SAIL snippet from cpopw:

    let bitcount = 0;

I encourage you to look at the newest isa manual draft on github: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual/releases

It includes the more recently extensions, and e.g. the bitmanip instructions all have associated pseudo code.

Here is e.g. the code for cpopw:

    let bitcount = 0;

I tried searching the spec [1] for "overflow" and here is what it says at page 17:

> We did not include special instruction-set support for overflow checks on integer arithmetic operations in the base instruction set, as many overflow checks can be cheaply implemented using RISC-V branches.

> For general signed addition, three additional instructions after the addition are required

Is this "cheap", replacing 1 instruction with four? According to some old mainframe era research (cannot find link now), addition is the most often used instruction and they suggest that we should replace each one with four?

Their "rationale" is not rational at all. It doesn't make sense.

Overflow check should be free (no additional instructions required), otherwise we will see the same story we have seen for last 50 years: compiler writers do not want to implement checks because they are expensive; language designers do not want to use proper arithmetic because it is expensive. As a result, there will be errors and vulnerabilities. A vicious circle.

[1] https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual/releases/download/...

Why not use the actual release PDF instead from their github? https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual

https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual/releases/download/Priv-v1.12/riscv-privileged-20211203.pdf Part 2

If you don't want to cheat then read the RISC-V ISA manual: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual/releases/download/Ratified-IMAFDQC/riscv-spec-20191213.pdf

Yeah you are on the right track. Processors are designed on top of an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). For an example you can look on top of the RISC-V specifications:https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual/releases/download/Ratified-IMAFDQC/riscv-spec-20191213.pdf (possible PDF download)