7. Target SoftwareΒΆ

Chipyard includes tools for developing target software workloads. The primary tool is FireMarshal, which manages workload descriptions and generates binaries and disk images to run on your target designs. Workloads can be bare-metal, or be based on standard Linux distributions. Users can customize every part of the build process, including providing custom kernels (if needed by the hardware).

FireMarshal can also run your workloads on high-performance functional simulators like Spike and Qemu. Spike is easily customized and serves as the official RISC-V ISA reference implementation. Qemu is a high-performance functional simulator that can run nearly as fast as native code, but can be challenging to modify.