Invited Talk Prof. Michael Engel, University of Bamberg, 20 May 2022
On 20th May 2022, Prof. Dr. Michael Engel, University of Bamberg, gave the invited talk “A RISC-V Experience Report” at FAU TechFak as part of the InvasIC Seminar of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 89.
Abstract:
The RISC-V architecture is one of the promising foundations for current and upcoming research projects as well as commercial products. It is especially attractive due to its open instruction-set architecture, which allows to create compliant implementations without having to license the use of specifications or IP implementations from a processor designer. In recent years, a whole ecosystem of open as well as commercial hardware and software solutions based on RISC-V has originated, with the vision of being able to create a completely open source computer system – from the first bit of hardware (description) to the last bit of software.
After an overview of the RISC-V architecture and available components, in this talk, I will discuss aspects of the RISC-V architecture and specifically its
hardware/software interface relevant for system software. Based on previous projects to port system-level code together with my students, I will analyze intricacies of the interface RISC-V provides to system software as well as the different relevant instruction set extensions available and in development.
Finally, I am going to give a glimpse on ongoing research in my group at Bamberg University and at NTNU which uses RISC-V to investigate novel approaches to hardware/software interfacing for systems with persistent main memory as well as distributed operating system environments for IoT applications.