~rumpelsepp

A wanted to do RISC-V experiments on bare metal for a long time. I always failed due to the lack of tooling, “how to start” documentation, and my own laziness. First some pointer what's RISC-V? RISC-V is a free (as in free speech) instruction set architecture (ISA) which defines an assembly language and a lot more other stuff. Any vendor can pick up the relevant documents to design and produce CPUs. Since there is a working C compiler and all the tooling available, a RISC-V CPU can nowadays run a complete Linux distribution out of the box. I hope it will replace the mess we are currently in with x86 and ARM…

I am (not yet) an expert in RISC-V assembler and the low level details of the code here. But I hope I will understand all this in the future. :) Anyway, I copy pasted a bare metal hello world program together and I want to share the code[^1] [^2]. The linker script had one problem which I fixed in my code; lld does not seem to support (wxa!ri). Thus I removed it.

I use Arch Linux and these are the required packages: qemu, qemu-extra-arch, clang, lld, make. No creepy third party software is required to run this. My code is here: https://codeberg.org/rumpelsepp/riscv-experiments. It can be run like this:

$ make
clang -mno-relax --target=riscv32 -c -o main.o main.s
ld.lld -T link.lds -o main main.o
$ qemu-system-riscv32 -machine sifive_u -nographic -kernel main
qemu-system-riscv32: warning: No -bios option specified. Not loading a firmware.
qemu-system-riscv32: warning: This default will change in a future QEMU release. Please use the -bios option to avoid breakages when this happens.
qemu-system-riscv32: warning: See QEMU's deprecation documentation for details.
Hello
Hello

As I do not yet understand what's going on here, the post is finished. But there is a minimal environment now to tinker with. I hope this helps, have fun.

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[^1]: assembly code

[^2]: linker script