Software stack

A set of software applications is available in app directory.

Applications

These applications are used to give an estimation of the computation performance of the CVA6 architecture.

The Coremark score will be used to rank teams. All applications must run correctly to validate your results in the contest.

These software applications are compiled in baremetal using the BSP (Board Support Package) in the bsp directory.

• Coremark : Complete benchmark for testing the computing power of a processor. It generates a score called Coremark.
• Dhrystone: Benchmark for testing the computing power of a processor. That generates a score in DMIPS VAX.
• Spmv: Double-precision sparse matrix-vector multiplication benchmark.
• Median: Benchmark that performs a 1D three elements median filter.
• Qsort: This benchmark uses quicksort to sort an array of integers.
• Rsort: This benchmark uses quicksort to sort an array of integers.
• Tower: Towers of Hanoi benchmark.
• Vvadd: Vector-Vector add benchmark. This benchmark uses adds to vectors and writes the results to a third vector.
• Multiply: Multiply filter benchmark. This tests the software multiply implementation.
• Pmp: test of the PMP in CVA6.

The Makefile in app directory allows the compilation of these applications. It consists of several targets . If you want to compile an application and generate an executable file, you need to go into app directory and run:

$ make ‘application’.riscv

That generates the application.riscv executable link file which can be run on CVA6. For instance with Coremark application:

$ make coremark.riscv

Another target may be useful to debug software applications on CVA6, it allows disassembling of the executable file, and it generates all the assembly code of the application. To do so, you have to run:

$ make ‘application’.D

For Coremark application:

$ make coremark.D

BSP (Board Support Package)

The BSP is a low-level software package that supports the hardware platform. The BSP is located into bsp directory and it consists of three directories:

• Config: It contains the linker script and fpga_platform_config.h file which defines some constant relating to the FPGA platform.
• Drivers: it contains all peripheral driver. For now, there is only the UART driver.
• Hal: Hardware Abstract Layer contains the runtime system interrupt vectors, system calls.

As of Oct. 12^th, 2020, applications and the BSP have been tested on a ZCU102 board, but not yet on the Z7-20 board.