Running Examples on AtomSim

The RISC-V Atom project consists of a wide range of examples programs out-of-the-box to test. These examples programs reside in RVATOM/sw/examples directory.

Switch to examples directory

$ cd sw/examples

Lets run the classical “hello World!” example first!

Hello World Example

The source code for the hello-world example resides in the hello-asm directory. You can have a look at the source code. First we need to compile the hello world example with our RISC-V gcc cross-compiler. For this purpose, use the provided makefile as following.

$ make soctarget=atombones ex=hello-asm sim=1 compile

The above command should generate a hello.elf file in the hello-asm directory.

Tip

soctarget=atombones in the above command can be skipped if AtomSim is already built. The SoC target will be automatically detected from the AtomSim executable.

Now fire up AtomSim and provide the generated elf file as argument.

$ atomsim -u hello-asm/hello.elf
   ___  __             _____
  / _ |/ /____  __ _  / __(_)_ _
 / __ / __/ _ \/  ' \_\ \/ /  ' \
/_/ |_\__/\___/_/_/_/___/_/_/_/_/  v2.2
----------8<-----------8<-----------8<-----------8<---------

**** RISC-V Atom Bootloader ****
bootmode: 0x1
Jumping to RAM
--------------------------------
Hello World!
      -- from Assembly

EBreak hit at 0x2000014a
Exiting..

You should see Hello world message on the screen.

Note

Make sure to use -u flag to direct UART output from SoC to stdout. You can also use -t flag to generate a VCD trace of the simulation.

Alternatively, use make run to run the example as follows

$ make soctarget=atombones ex=hello-asm run

We can compile other examples also in the similar fashion by using the following syntax:

$ make soctarget=<TARGET> ex=<EXAMPLE> sim=1 compile
$ make soctarget=<TARGET> ex=<EXAMPLE> run

Note

Run $ make help to get more information about supported targets and examples.

How to compile and run all examples?

Instead of testing all examples one-by-one, we can compile and run all examples as follows.

$ make soctarget=atombones run-all

Using Atomsim Vuart

When using -u flag, AtomSim relays the output of the running application on stdout. But, in this mode of operation, user cannot provide any input to the running program. AtomSim provides Virtual UART to work around this problem. Virtual UART is an inbuilt class in AtomSim that can attach the stdin, stdout streams of the simulation to a linux serial port.

digraph G { rankdir=LR; subgraph cluster_0 { style=filled; fillcolor=lightgrey; label="Pair of pseudo serial ports using socat as relay"; Userport [shape=rect, style=filled, fillcolor=orange]; Simport [shape=rect, style=filled, fillcolor=orange]; Socat [shape=ellipse, style=filled, fillcolor=yellow]; Userport -> Socat -> Simport [dir=both]; } subgraph cluster_1 { style=filled; fillcolor=cyan; label="AtomSim"; VUART [shape=rect, style=filled, fillcolor=gray]; RTL [shape=rect, label="RTL\nSimulation", style=filled, fillcolor=gray]; VUART -> RTL [dir=both, label="UART traffic"]; } Screen [shape=rect, style=filled, fillcolor=cyan]; ttyUSB [shape=rect, style=filled, fillcolor=orange]; FPGA [shape=box3d, style=filled, fillcolor=green]; Screen -> Userport [label=attach]; Simport -> VUART [dir=back, label=attach]; Screen -> ttyUSB [label=attach]; ttyUSB -> FPGA [label=USB]; }

Generating Pseudo Serial Ports

A pair of connected pseudo serial ports can be generated by using the provided atomsim-gen-vports script as following.

$ atomsim-gen-vports

This will generate a pair of new pseudo serial ports in /dev/pts and links them together using the socat linux command. This means that whatever is sent to port-1 is received at port-2 and vice-versa. Further, this script also generates symlinks to these generated ports in the RVATOM directory as simport and userport.

Interacting with Stdout and Stdin over Pseudo Serial Ports

Open a new terminal (say terminal-2) and run the screen command as following

$ screen $RVATOM/userport 115200

And on the other terminal (terminal-1) run atomsim as following

$ atomsim hello-asm/hello.s -p $RVATOM/simport -b 115200

You should now be able to see the output on the terminal-2.

Tip

To close screen first press ctrl + a, then press k followed by y. To clear the screen window, press ctrl + a, then press shift + c.

Adding New Examples

To add a new example to the existing framework, simply create a directory under the RVATOM/sw/examples directory.

$ mkdir myexample

Next, put your source files under this directory.

$ cat myexample.c
#include <stdio.h>
void main()
{
    char hello[] = "New Example\n";
    printf(hello);
    return;
}

Finally add a new file named Makefile.include in the same directory which defines the name of the source files and executable file as follows.

$ cat Makefile.include
src_files = myexample.c
executable = myexample.elf

That’s it! Now you can use the same compile and run commands as discussed earlier to run this example.