devsim

Quick hardware development-cycle using Verilator, Rust, and ImGui.

The goal here is to bring the turn-around-time for developing and simulating hardware down as much as possible. You should be able to save the verilog and see the results instantly. With the view Rust bin here, we are able to simulate the hardware and let it render to a framebuffer in real time. See Device in the Rust code for details.

Getting started

Installing Build Pre-Reqs

Building is straight forward but has a couple of steps. The common theme here is to install the following components:

Rust
CMake
Verilator with CMake support
VulkanSDK
Optionally, prebuild shaderc and direct cargo to use that instead. Instructions for this are located here.

Note on Apple Silicon: The process should be the same on Apple Silicon, but you will have to decide between building for Intel and using Rosetta, or building for native AS.

Rust

Rust has a nice getting started page here.

CMake

You can use your favorite package manager to install cmake, or get it here.

on Windows, try chocolatey
on MacOS, try Homebrew

Verilator

Verilator is available in most package managers. You will need version @TODO or later, for CMake support.

MacOS: The verilator bottle on brew works fine.
Windows: @TODO hahahahaha suffer
Ubuntu: Starting with Ubuntu 20.04, the verilator package works fine.
Other platforms should work but we hav en't tested yet.

VulkanSDK

Installing Vulkan is detailed on the LunarG site. You can test that Vulkan is setup correctly with:

$ vulkaninfo

Building

devsim builds with Cargo.

$ cargo build
$ cargo run

You can then drag and drop a RISC-V elf binary onto the window to begin executing. You can also simulate without the UI by specifying the sim binary.

$ cargo run --bin sim

@TODO: Detail how to make a RISC-V elf binary using Rust.

impakt73/devsim