1.4. Initial Repository Setup

1.4.1. Prerequisites

Chipyard is developed and tested on Linux-based systems.

Warning

It is possible to use this on macOS or other BSD-based systems, although GNU tools will need to be installed; it is also recommended to install the RISC-V toolchain from brew.

Warning

Working under Windows is not recommended.

1.4.1.1. Running on AWS EC2 with FireSim

If you plan on using Chipyard alongside FireSim on AWS EC2 instances, you should refer to the FireSim documentation. Specifically, you should follow the Initial Setup/Installation section of the docs up until Setting up the FireSim Repo. At that point, instead of cloning FireSim you can clone Chipyard by following Setting up the Chipyard Repo.

1.4.1.2. Default Requirements Installation

In Chipyard, we use the Conda package manager to help manage system dependencies. Conda allows users to create an “environment” that holds system dependencies like make, gcc, etc.

Note

Chipyard can also run on systems without a Conda installation. However, users on these systems must manually install toolchains and dependencies.

First, Chipyard requires Conda to be installed on the system. Please refer to the Conda installation instructions on how to install Conda with the Miniforge installer. Afterwards, verify that Conda is a sufficient version (we test on version 4.12.0 but higher is most likely fine).

Note

If you have installed conda separately from this documentation (i.e. from miniconda or full Anaconda), please ensure you follow https://conda-forge.org/docs/user/introduction.html#how-can-i-install-packages-from-conda-forge to use conda-forge packages without any issues.

conda --version # must be version 4.12.0 or higher

After Conda is installed and is on your PATH, we need to install a version of git to initially checkout the repository. For this you can use the system package manager like yum or apt to install git. This git is only used to first checkout the repository, we will later install a newer version of git with Conda.

Finally we need to install conda-lock into the base conda environment. This is done by the following:

conda install -n base conda-lock
conda activate base

1.4.2. Setting up the Chipyard Repo

Start by checking out the proper Chipyard version. Run:

git clone https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard.git
cd chipyard
# checkout latest official chipyard release
# note: this may not be the latest release if the documentation version != "stable"
git checkout 1.8.0

Next run the following script to create Chipyard’s Conda environment including a pre-built RISC-V toolchain. There are two toolchains, one for normal RISC-V programs called riscv-tools which is the one needed for most Chipyard use-cases, and another for Hwacha/Gemmini called esp-tools. Run the following script based off which compiler you would like to use.

./build-setup.sh riscv-tools # or esp-tools

This script wraps around the conda environment initialization process and also runs the init-submodules-no-riscv-tools.sh and build-toolchain-extra.sh scripts.

The init-subodules-no-riscv-tools.sh script will initialize and checkout all of the necessary git submodules. This will also validate that you are on a tagged branch, otherwise it will prompt for confirmation. When updating Chipyard to a new version, you will also want to rerun this script to update the submodules. Using git directly will try to initialize all submodules; this is not recommended unless you expressly desire this behavior.

The build-toolchain-extra.sh script will install extra toolchain utilities/tests used by Chipyard. This command builds utilities like Spike, RISC-V Proxy Kernel, libgloss, and RISC-V tests from source for a specific toolchain type.

Note

By default, the build-toolchain-extra.sh script installs to $CONDA_PREFIX/<toolchain-type>. Thus, if you uninstall the compiler using conda remove these utilities/tests will also have to be re-installed/built.

Note

If you already have a working conda environment setup, separate Chipyard clones can use that pre-used environment in combination with running the aforementioned scripts yourself (init-submodules... and build-toolchain...).

Note

If you are a power user and would like to build your own compiler/toolchain, you can refer to the https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-tools-feedstock and https://github.com/ucb-bar/esp-tools-feedstock repositories (submoduled in the toolchains/* directories) on how to build the compiler yourself.

By running the following command you should see a environment listed with the path $CHIPYARD_DIRECTORY/.conda-env.

conda env list

Note

Refer to FireSim’s Conda documentation on more information on how to use Conda and some of its benefits.

1.4.3. Sourcing env.sh

Once setup is complete, an emitted env.sh file should exist in the top-level repository. This file activates the conda environment created in build-setup.sh and sets up necessary environment variables needed for future Chipyard steps (needed for the make system to work properly). Once the script is run, the PATH, RISCV, and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables will be set properly for the toolchain requested. You can source this file in your .bashrc or equivalent environment setup file to get the proper variables, or directly include it in your current environment:

source ./env.sh

Warning

This env.sh file should always be sourced before running any make commands.

Note

You can deactivate/activate a compiler/toolchain (but keep it installed) by running source $CONDA_PREFIX/etc/conda/deactivate.d/deactivate-${PKG_NAME}.sh or $CONDA_PREFIX/etc/conda/activate.d/activate-${PKG_NAME}.sh (PKG_NAME for example is ucb-bar-riscv-tools). This will modify the aforementioned 3 environment variables.

Warning

env.sh files are generated per-Chipyard repository. In a multi-Chipyard repository setup, it is possible to source multiple env.sh files (in any order). However, it is recommended that the final env.sh file sourced is the env.sh located in the Chipyard repo that you expect to run make commands in.

1.4.4. Pre-built Docker Image

An alternative to setting up the Chipyard repository locally is to pull the pre-built Docker image from Docker Hub. The image comes with all dependencies installed, Chipyard cloned, and toolchains initialized. This image sets up baseline Chipyard (not including FireMarshal, FireSim, and Hammer initializations). Each image comes with a tag that corresponds to the version of Chipyard cloned/set-up in that image. Not including a tag during the pull will pull the image with the latest version of Chipyard. First, pull the Docker image. Run:

sudo docker pull ucbbar/chipyard-image:<TAG>

To run the Docker container in an interactive shell, run:

sudo docker run -it ucbbar/chipyard-image bash

1.4.5. What’s Next?

This depends on what you are planning to do with Chipyard.

  • If you intend to run a simulation of one of the vanilla Chipyard examples, go to Software RTL Simulation and follow the instructions.

  • If you intend to run a simulation of a custom Chipyard SoC Configuration, go to Simulating A Custom Project and follow the instructions.

  • If you intend to run a full-system FireSim simulation, go to FPGA-Accelerated Simulation and follow the instructions.

  • If you intend to add a new accelerator, go to Basic customization and follow the instructions.

  • If you want to learn about the structure of Chipyard, go to Chipyard Components.

  • If you intend to change the generators (BOOM, Rocket, etc) themselves, see Included RTL Generators.

  • If you intend to run a tutorial VLSI flow using one of the Chipyard examples, go to ASAP7 Tutorial and follow the instructions.

  • If you intend to build a chip using one of the vanilla Chipyard examples, go to Building A Chip and follow the instructions.

1.4.6. Upgrading Chipyard Release Versions

In order to upgrade between Chipyard versions, we recommend using a fresh clone of the repository (or your fork, with the new release merged into it).

Chipyard is a complex framework that depends on a mix of build systems and scripts. Specifically, it relies on git submodules, on sbt build files, and on custom written bash scripts and generated files. For this reason, upgrading between Chipyard versions is not as trivial as just running git submodule update --recursive. This will result in recursive cloning of large submodules that are not necessarily used within your specific Chipyard environments. Furthermore, it will not resolve the status of stale state generated files which may not be compatible between release versions.

If you are an advanced git user, an alternative approach to a fresh repository clone may be to run git clean -dfx, and then run the standard Chipyard setup sequence. This approach is dangerous, and not-recommended for users who are not deeply familiar with git, since it “blows up” the repository state and removes all untracked and modified files without warning. Hence, if you were working on custom un-committed changes, you would lose them.

If you would still like to try to perform an in-place manual version upgrade (not-recommended), we recommend at least trying to resolve stale state in the following areas:

  • Delete stale target directories generated by sbt.

  • Re-generate generated scripts and source files (for example, env.sh)

  • Re-generating/deleting target software state (Linux kernel binaries, Linux images) within FireMarshal

This is by no means a comprehensive list of potential stale state within Chipyard. Hence, as mentioned earlier, the recommended method for a Chipyard version upgrade is a fresh clone (or a merge, and then a fresh clone).