I have been increasingly interested in the RISC-V instruction set architecture recently and have undertaken a number of personal projects in this area.

For my initial foray into this realm I wanted to get my toes wet and decided to write an emulator for an RV32I processor, the base instruction set. The project quickly grew arms and legs and I had achieved much more than I thought I would at the outset.

The repository can be found here: https://github.com/bit-hack/riscv-vm

In its current state it is functions as a user mode emulator providing system call emulation which allows the virtualized processes to interact with the host OS. It passes many of the relevant RISC-V compliance tests and can even run an extensive set of benchmarks such as Dhrystone, Coremark, etc.

One of the most exciting features to me though, it that it can run Doom and Quake at decent speeds.

These two games were the most valuable benchmarks in terms of measuring execution speed, and initially they ran fairly slowly. DOOM was very easy to port as most of the hard work had been done as part of the DoomGeneric project. Quake however, required a fairly large amount of rework to build for my virtual machine which I spun off into its own project portable_quake which very much follows the principles of the DOOM port.

My pursuit of speed ultimately lead me to write an X86-64 JIT compiler for the VM allowing me to dynamically translate RISC-V code blocks into X86-64 code. This was a fascinating, rewarding and fairly complex process, but I learned a heck of a lot doing it which is always my main goal.

There is enough distinct topics in this project that I want to focus on them in more depth in following articles. The project is far from complete however and there are a lot of updates in the pipeline.

I also want to share some of the work I have done writing a tiny RV32I processor in Verilog to run on an FPGA using and OpenSource flow using Verilator, APIO and IceStorm.