GVSoC is the PULP chips simulator that is natively included in the Pulp SDK and is described and evaluated fully in Bruschi et al. [arXiv:2201.08166v1].

The user documentation, focusing on how to use GVSOC, is available here.

The developer documentation, focusing on how to develop models or extend GVSOC is available [here] (https://gvsoc-developer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

If you want to learn more about GVSoC, get started through the tutorial available here. This tutorial provides hands-on practice on building systems on GVSoC and extracting the performance results.

These instructions were developed using a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish).

The following packages needed to be installed:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential git doxygen python3-pip libsdl2-dev curl cmake gtkwave libsndfile1-dev rsync autoconf automake texinfo libtool pkg-config libsdl2-ttf-dev wget sphinx-build doxygen libdw-dev

These are the packages neded on a Fedora:

sudo dnf install -y make gcc cmake ninja-build.x86_64 g++ pip lz4-devel ccache glibc-devel.i686 zlib-ng-compat-devel.i686 SDL2 SDL2-devel SDL2_ttf-devel.x86_64 SDL2_image-devel.x86_64 wget2 sphinx-build doxygen elfutils-libs

Please also check any README.md in the submodules for target-specific requirements, like for example pulp/README.md.

GVSoC needs libdw (from elfutils) at build and run time. It is available by default on most machines (on Ubuntu it is provided by libdw-dev, on Fedora by elfutils-devel), so usually nothing special is required.

On hosts where libdw is missing and cannot be installed system-wide (for example shared compute clusters where you have no root access), run the deps target once. It downloads and builds libdw from source and installs it into the SDK install folder:

make deps

The build automatically adds the install folder's include/lib to the compiler search paths (after the regular ones), so once make deps has run this private copy is picked up at build time; otherwise the build uses the system libdw. The install folder's lib is also baked into the binaries' RPATH, so the private copy is found at run time without any extra setup (no need to export LD_LIBRARY_PATH). You only need to run make deps once (or after make clean), before building.

Additional Python packages are needed and can be installed with the following commands from root folder:

git submodule update --init --recursive -j8
pip3 install -r core/requirements.txt
pip3 install -r gapy/requirements.txt

Get submodules and compile GVSoC with this command:

make all TARGETS=<target>

should indicate the target for which GVSoC must be build. This can for example be generic targets rv32 or rv64.

On ETH network, please use this command to get the proper version of gcc and cmake:

CXX=g++-14.2.0 CC=gcc-14.2.0 CMAKE=cmake-3.18.1 make all TARGETS=pulp-open

The ETH machines do not ship libdw, and it cannot be installed system-wide, so you must build it into the SDK install folder once with the deps target before building (see the libdw (elfutils) section above):

CXX=g++-14.2.0 CC=gcc-14.2.0 CMAKE=cmake-3.18.1 make deps
CXX=g++-14.2.0 CC=gcc-14.2.0 CMAKE=cmake-3.18.1 make all TARGETS=pulp-open

The following example can be launched on pulp-open:

./install/bin/gvsoc --target=pulp-open --binary examples/pulp-open/hello image flash run

If you intend to use or reference GVSoC for an academic publication, please consider citing it:

@INPROCEEDINGS{9643828,
	author={Bruschi, Nazareno and Haugou, Germain and Tagliavini, Giuseppe and Conti, Francesco and Benini, Luca and Rossi, Davide},
	booktitle={2021 IEEE 39th International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD)},
	title={GVSoC: A Highly Configurable, Fast and Accurate Full-Platform Simulator for RISC-V based IoT Processors},
	year={2021},
	volume={},
	number={},
	pages={409-416},
	doi={10.1109/ICCD53106.2021.00071}}

If you want to use DRAMsys with GVSoC follow the steps mentioned in DRAMsys.md