A Simple RISC-V CPU Simulator with 5 Stage Pipeline, Branch Prediction and Cache Simulation

It is a simple RISC-V Emulator suppprting user mode RV64I instruction set, from PKU Computer Architecture Labs, Spring 2019. I made my project open source in the hope that others can learn from my code about how to make a CPU Emulator and get a deeper understanding in computer architecture. As it is implemented entirely from scratch (with no code from Prof or TA), I think it's fine to make it open source.

Note that this is just a toy for learning and is NOT a robust and full solution to RISC-V CPU Emulation. Use qemu for that purpose instead.

1. Supporting 54 RISC-V instructions from the RV64I instruction set.
2. Branch perdiction module with a set of branch perdicton algorithms.
3. Simulation of five stage pipeline like that in the "Computer Organization and Design, Hardware/Software Interface" Book.
4. Simulation of cache and various cache eviction strategies.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

./Simulator riscv-elf-file-name [-v] [-s] [-d] [-b strategy]

Parameters:

1. -v for verbose output, can redirect output to file for further analysis
2. -s for single step execution, often used in combination with -v.
3. -d for creating memory and register history dump in dump.txt
4. -b for branch perdiction strategy (default BTFNT), accepted parameters are AT, NT, BTFNT and BPB.
   • AT: Always Taken
   • NT: Always Not Taken
   • BTFNT: Back Taken Forward Not Taken
   • BPB: Branch Prediction Buffer (2 bit history information)

There are a number of reference RISC-V ELFs and its corresponding assembly code in the riscv-elf/ folder.

See the doc/ folder.

Also, you can see the corresponding blog.