Interview with Arun Thomas
RISC-V. Open Hardware for Your Open Source Software
Arun Thomas will give a talk about RISC-V. Open Hardware for Your Open Source Software at FOSDEM 2017.
Q: Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I am a researcher at BAE Systems R&D. I tend to do work at the hardware-software interface. That’s why I became interested in RISC-V. I’ve been involved in various open source projects over the years, but my current mission, in my RISC-V Foundation role, is to grow the RISC-V community.
Q: What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?
I will talk about about RISC-V, a new open instruction set architecture (ISA). Unlike x86 and ARM, RISC-V does not require any licensing fees or lengthy contract negotiations for those who want to build RISC-V cores. RISC-V is an open instruction set specification that any hardware vendor (or individual) can implement. It also happens to be a well designed, extensible ISA that targets the full range of computing devices. As such, RISC-V is a good foundation for open hardware efforts.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect?
I’m hoping to increase awareness of RISC-V in the open source community. I’d like to encourage hardware and software developers to contribute to the RISC-V ISA and various RISC-V projects. I also want to give open source maintainers a heads-up about RISC-V, since there will be many RISC-V patches coming their way in 2017.
Q: What’s the history of the RISC-V project? And how did you become involved?
Krste Asanovic and David Patterson, professors at UC Berkeley, and their graduate students Andrew Waterman and Yunsup Lee embarked on a “three-month project” in summer 2010 to create a simple, extensible ISA for their research. Four years later, the frozen RISC-V user ISA specification was released. In August 2015, the RISC-V Foundation was formed to foster the development of the RISC-V ISA.
I became involved with RISC-V in 2014. I was working on the DARPA-funded CRASH/SAFE project, a joint research effort between BAE Systems, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Northeastern University to design new hardware/software security mechanisms. My team decided to explore replacing our custom CRASH/SAFE ISA with RISC-V. As I worked more with RISC-V, I started to submit pull requests for various things, and I eventually got sucked into the RISC-V community. It’s the classic open source story.
Q: What are the advantages of the RISC-V architecture for hardware designers? And in which domains does it shine?
In addition to being open, RISC-V has several technical advantages. RISC-V has a small base integer ISA that has fewer than 50 instructions. This makes it possible to implement very small RISC-V cores. Hardware designers can choose to layer standard extensions (e.g., floating point) on top of the base integer ISA or they can design their own extensions. By adopting this base+extensions approach, RISC-V allows for easy customization and allows a single ISA to scale from microcontrollers to big iron. Currently, there is substantial interest in using RISC-V in IoT applications, supercomputing, and accelerators.
Q: How’s interest in the RISC-V architecture in the semiconductor industry? And are there already usable RISC-V processors?
There is strong interest from industry. The RISC-V Foundation boasts over 50 members and includes Nvidia, IBM, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsemi, Microsoft, Oracle, Qualcomm, AMD, Lattice, Micron, NXP, Western Digital, and Bluespec. There have been a number of talks at past RISC-V Workshops that describe how companies such as Nvidia are using RISC-V in their products.
SiFive, BlueSpec, lowRISC, IIT Madras, ETH Zurich and others have RISC-V SoCs that can be used today.
Q: What can we expect this year in the RISC-V world?
I expect we’ll see more RISC-V silicon shipping in 2017. SiFive is the first company to ship RISC-V silicon, but there are several other projects that plan to ship silicon this year. I also expect to see a lot more RISC-V software this year. Now that binutils is upstream and GCC is days from being upstream, I expect more Linux distros to pick up RISC-V support. (I should note that FreeBSD and the Zephyr kernel already have upstream support for RISC-V.) I also expect we will make progress on various ISA and platform specifications as well.
Q: What does the project’s community look like? How can interested people contribute? In which domains could it use some help?
The RISC-V community includes industry, academia, hackers, makers, hardware folks, and software folks from all over the world. We hold RISC-V Workshops every 6 months to get the community together. The next RISC-V Workshop will be in Shanghai on May 9-10. I would encourage interested contributors to attend a workshop if they can. It’s a great way to meet the community and find out about all the exciting RISC-V happenings.
Most development and coordination happens on mailing lists and GitHub. RISC-V ISA enhancement proposals can be sent to the isa-dev mailing list, and GitHub pull requests can be submitted to the various RISC-V hardware and software projects. We would appreciate any help porting software to RISC-V and writing/improving documentation. We would like to see RISC-V support for all the major Linux distributions in the near future. Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and Yocto ports are all underway. Open source RISC-V hardware projects (e.g., Rocket Chip and lowRISC) could also use contributions.
Q: Have you enjoyed previous FOSDEM editions?
I had a blast at FOSDEM 2011 and 2012. I’m looking forward to finally making it back. It’s been far too long.
Creative Commons License
This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.