Using Pydrofoil#

Testing compiled RISC-V executables#

Pydrofoil accepts a compiled RISC-V executable and will run it. Typically, the source code of the executable will test some RISC-V feature and report success/failure. It should work on the same ELF files that the standard Sail-based emulator also accepts. The following example commands should be executed from a sail-riscv checkout.

./pydrofoil-riscv test/riscv-tests/rv64ui-p-addi.elf

which will print:

tohost located at 0x80001000
entrypoint 0x80000000
CSR mstatus <- 0x0000000A00000000 (input: 0x0000000000000000)
SUCCESS
Instructions: 259
Total time (s): 0.000712
Perf: 363.806007 Kips

A Pydrofoil binary contains an emulator for the 64-bit and for the 32-bit variants of the RISC-V model. By default, the 64-bit emulator is used. To chose the 32-bit emulator, you can use the --rv32 commandline option:

./pydrofoil-riscv --rv32 test/riscv-tests/rv32ui-p-addi.elf

which prints:

tohost located at 0x80001000
entrypoint 0x80000000
CSR mstatus <- 0x00000000 (input: 0x00000000)
SUCCESS
Instructions: 256
Total time (s): 0.001858
Perf: 137.782859 Kips

Booting Linux under Pydrofoil#

This is an example of how to boot a Linux kernel using the Pydrofoil emulator:

./pydrofoil-riscv os-boot/rv64-linux-4.15.0-gcc-7.2.0-64mb.bbl -l 230000000

This command will run the Linux image that is part of the sail-riscv repo until the login prompt. The instruction limit of 230 million instructions is chosen such that booting proceeds until the login prompt.

You can try the equivalent command on the standard Sail emulator:

dtc < os-boot/rv64-64mb.dts > os-boot/rv64-64mb.dtb

./c_emulator/riscv_sim_RV64 --show-times -b os-boot/rv64-64mb.dtb \
    os-boot/rv64-linux-4.15.0-gcc-7.2.0-64mb.bbl -l 230000000 -V

The dtb file is a device tree blob that describes the emulated hardware to the operating system, it gets generated from a human-readable input file with the dtc command. dtc is provided by apt install device-tree-compiler on Ubuntu. Pydrofoil comes with its own dtb and therefore doesn’t need this argument.

Booting Linux is about 18 times faster with Pydrofoil and uses about 8 times the memory when compared to the Sail emulator on the two Ubuntu x86_64 machines we tried:

x86_64 machine

Pydrofoil

Sail emulator

Ratio

laptop (i7-8565U)

4min

75min

1:18.7

Ryzen 9 3900X

115sec

34min36sec

1:18.1

RSS memory

318MB

39MB

8:1

Commandline Options#

The pydrofoil-riscv binary accepts the following commandline options:

  • --rv32 run emulator in 32-bit mode (default: 64-bit)

  • -l/--inst-limit <limit> stop execution after limit instructions (by default execution is only halted if a test is stopped via the htif device).

  • --instructions-per-tick <num> tick the emulated clock every num instructions (default: 100).

  • -b/--device-tree-blob <file> load dtb from file (but usually not needed)

  • --verbose print a detailed trace of every instruction executed

  • --jit off turn dynamic binary translation/JIT compilation off

  • --version print the version of pydrofoil-riscv