Here we will share some of our experience and issues encountered when running and building software for the RISC-V testbed.
RISC-V soft-core support
As well as supporting physical hardware (e.g. Allwinner D1, SiFive U74, and 64-core SOPHGO SG2042 CPUs), the testbed also supports RISC-V soft-cores running on an ADM-PA101, which is an AMD/Xilinx Versal FPGA equipped with 16GB DDR.
Background
In order to simplify development, the ADM-PA101 has been set up to run PetaLinux, to allow the soft-cores to be added to the Slurm cluster as the card has Ethernet access. To enable this, we need to configure PetaLinux to boot via ‘tftp’ and mount its root filesystem over NFS.
More...Toolchains & Cross-debugging
In this post we cover the toolchains and debugging tools available to compile applications for RISC-V. These allow users to cross-compile RISC-V executables on the login node, which can then be run on the testbed nodes. The toolchains provide various binutils, such as ld - linker, as - assembler, and objdump - displays object file information.
Compiling Vector Code
Some of the hardware (e.g. Sophon SG2042 and Allwinner D1) within the testbed supports RISC-V V vector extension (RVV). Here we document and provide references for compiling code with vector instructions.
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