When:
Thursday, December 21, 2023 @ 7:00pm
Where:
Wright State University
Russ Engineering Center, Room 302
We will also have an online presence via the Zoom web conferencing service.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87602254357
Meeting ID: 876 0225 4357
If joining a meeting from a Windows PC, the Zoom client will automagically download and attempt to install. For those using Linux, you can download the free (not Free) Zoom client from this page. It’s available for a variety of distributions.
For those attending in person, we will most likely adjourn to Milano’s afterward for food and socializing.
Presentations/Topics:
Michael T. Kloos will discuss the basics of the RISC-V architecture and his journey with implementing a RISC-V emulator and the associated Linux system.
I love to learn about how things work and I love to tinker. Like many who get into computers, I have been fascinated since a young age by the capabilities and possibles of these devices. Ever since I was a little boy, I have dreamed of designing and building a computer from scratch. I want it to be capable of running a minimal Linux system. It doesn’t need to be fast, but it should be simple and be computationally correct.
To that end, I would like to talk about where I am in my journey. I have decided to implement a minimal version of the RISC-V CPU architecture. Before designing real hardware, I needed to prove that I understand the architecture and can get a Linux kernel running. To do that, I needed to build an emulator.
I will discuss the various low-level fundamentals of a computer and how they work in RISC-V. I will then go on to explain how I created a custom RISC-V emulator, running a minimal Linux system. I will discuss what the Linux kernel needs to boot and run in a RISC-V system and how to build a small userspace environment for it.