SPIKE is the RISC-V ISA Simulator. It can be used to run simple test programs with out the need to boot in to a QEMU RISC-V instance or have access to RISC-V hardware. Please note that runtimes will be slower than running on real RISC-V hardware especially for features such as RVV Vector extensions, so, any benchmarking must be done on real RISC-V hardware.
If you have not already set up the RISC-V GCC Toolchain on your computer, please complete that step first.
Spike setup
First install the pre-requisites.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install device-tree-compiler
sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev
Clone the SPIKE Repository
This should be set up in the RISCV directory you created when setting up the RISC-V GCC Toolchain.
cd RISCV
git clone https://github.com/riscv-software-src/riscv-isa-sim.git
git clone https://github.com/riscv/riscv-pk.git
Configure and Build SPIKE
If you are using an ARM CPU computer, change x86_64-linux-gnu to aarch64-linux-gnu in the --with-boost-libdir= option.
cd riscv-isa-sim
mkdir build
cd build
sudo ../configure --prefix=$RISCV --host=riscv64-unknown-elf --with-boost-libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
Configure and Build RISCV-PK
RISCV-PK is the Proxy Kernal used by the SPIKE ISA Simulator.
cd ../../riscv-pk
mkdir build
cd build
../configure --prefix=$RISCV --host=riscv64-unknown-elf
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
Test the Install
Go to a directory where you have compiled a RISC-V executable using the RISC-V GCC Toolchain and run it using the command line below. In this example we have assumed that your executable is called main.
spike --isa=RV64IMACV $RISCV/riscv-pk/build/pk ./main
You should now be able to run a RISC-V executable on an x64 Ubuntu computer.