Brussels / 1 & 2 February 2020

schedule

Port luajit to RISC-V

Motivation, first steps and perspectives


There is a need for a lightweight tools for experiments with RISC-V custom extensions. Adding support for custom instructions in binutils/gcc/llvm is out of range for many hardware architects. LuaJIT includes a small and powerful assembler: dynasm, accessible from within Lua interpreter. Currently dynasm supports following 32 and 64-bit instruction sets: x86, x64, ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS, and it is just reasonable to extend this support to RISC-V.

Lua itself is a very compact and simple yet powerful dynamic language, its JIT compiler (luajit) makes it one of the fastest, if not the fastest, interpreted language, and it is used in many projects, so having it running on RISC-V would have use besides the mere internal need for experimental platform.

Outline

Project scope

  • Lua 5.1, luajit 2.1 overview
  • rv32/rv64
  • dynasm
  • interpreter/virtual machine
  • jit
  • gc
  • bit manipulation ('B' extention and bitop in Lua 5.3)

Develpment platforms

  • spike (ISA simulator, 32 and 64-bit)
  • rv64: SiFive Unleashed
  • rv32: softcore CPU on FPGA

Benchmarks and baseline

Deviation (side project)

Yet another Forth and yet another assembler

Speakers

Photo of Anton Kuzmin Anton Kuzmin

Attachments

Links