Stumbling with Spike

31 Oct 2022 #modelling #architecture #micro #architecture

This post is intended to act as a quick reference guide to installing dependencies, in case you want to build Spike on a machine where you do not have sudo priviledges.

Assumptions:

  • riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu toolchain is already built and availble on the PATH.
  • Boost is already available
  • A decent version of GCC is available In my case, I used GCC-10.3.0, with Boost-1.76.0.

Install DTC

The device tree compiler (dtc) executable is a requirement for Spike. It can be compiled from scratch. The binary should be made available in the PATH environment variable.

export PATH=$PATH:<path to the binary>

Install ProxyKernel

mkdir build
cd build 
../configure --prefix=<install prefix> --host=riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu
make -j all
make install
export PATH=$PATH:<install prefix>/bin

Note

  • If you try to build in the root of the repository, the output file for pk does not get generated, as there is a directory with the same name. Hence, using a build folder helps!

Install spike.

./configure --prefix=<install prefix> --with-boost=<path to boost root> --enable-commitlog --with-isa=RV64IMAFDCP 
make -j all
make install
export PATH=$PATH:<install prefix>/bin

Note:

  • In my specific installation, Boost libraries could not be found even after setting appropriate LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Explictly specifiying the path solved the issue.
  • Take a look at the output of ./configure --help to find options of Spike that might be relevant. For example, --enable-commitlog was something that was relevant for me.

Spike Execution

Creating the executable

riscv64-unknown-elf-gcc -o hello hello.c

Actual execution

To run spike with a program and log the commits to a file:

spike  -m 1G --log-commits --log=spike_log.txt $(\which pk) hello
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