| Metadata Table | |
|---|---|
| Manual Type | user |
| Spec Revision | 20181106-Base-Ratification |
| Spec Release Date | |
| Git Revision | 20181106-Base-Ratification |
| Git URL | https://github.com/riscv/riscv-isa-manual.git |
| Source | src/intro.tex |
| Conversion Date | 2023/11/12 |
| License | CC-by-4.0 |
RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is a new instruction-set architecture (ISA) that was originally designed to support computer architecture research and education, but which we now hope will also become a standard free and open architecture for industry implementations. Our goals in defining RISC-V include:
A completely open ISA that is freely available to academia and industry.
A real ISA suitable for direct native hardware implementation, not just simulation or binary translation.
An ISA that avoids “over-architecting” for a particular microarchitecture style (e.g., microcoded, in-order, decoupled, out-of-order) or implementation technology (e.g., full-custom, ASIC, FPGA), but which allows efficient implementation in any of these.
An ISA separated into a small base integer ISA, usable by itself as a base for customized accelerators or for educational purposes, and optional standard extensions, to support general-purpose software development.
Support for the revised 2008 IEEE-754 floating-point standard [ieee754-2008].
An ISA supporting extensive ISA extensions and specialized variants.
Both 32-bit and 64-bit address space variants for applications, operating system kernels, and hardware implementations.
An ISA with support for highly-parallel multicore or manycore implementations, including heterogeneous multiprocessors.
Optional variable-length instructions to both expand available instruction encoding space and to support an optional dense instruction encoding for improved performance, static code size, and energy efficiency.
A fully virtualizable ISA to ease hypervisor development.
An ISA that simplifies experiments with new privileged architecture designs.
The name RISC-V was chosen to represent the fifth major RISC ISA design from UC Berkeley (RISC-I [riscI-isca1981], RISC-II [Katevenis:1983], SOAR [Ungar:1984], and SPUR [spur-jsscc1989] were the first four). We also pun on the use of the Roman numeral “V” to signify “variations” and “vectors”, as support for a range of architecture research, including various data-parallel accelerators, is an explicit goal of the ISA design.
The RISC-V ISA is defined avoiding implementation details as much as possible (although commentary is included on implementation-driven decisions) and should be read as the software-visible interface to a wide variety of implementations rather than as the design of a particular hardware artifact. The RISC-V manual is structured in two volumes. This volume covers the design of the base unprivileged instructions, including optional unprivileged ISA extensions. Unprivileged instructions are those that are generally usable in all privilege modes in all privileged architectures, though behavior might vary depending on privilege mode and privilege architecture. The second volume provides the design of the first (“classic”) privileged architecture. The manuals use IEC 80000-13:2008 conventions, with a byte of 8 bits.
In the unprivileged ISA design, we tried to remove any dependence on particular microarchitectural features, such as cache line size, or on privileged architecture details, such as page translation. This is both for simplicity and to allow maximum flexibility for alternative microarchitectures or alternative privileged architectures.
A RISC-V hardware platform can contain one or more RISC-V-compatible processing cores together with other non-RISC-V-compatible cores, fixed-function accelerators, various physical memory structures, I/O devices, and an interconnect structure to allow the components to communicate.
A component is termed a core if it contains an independent instruction fetch unit. A RISC-V-compatible core might support multiple RISC-V-compatible hardware threads, or harts, through multithreading.
A RISC-V core might have additional specialized instruction-set extensions or an added coprocessor. We use the term coprocessor to refer to a unit that is attached to a RISC-V core and is mostly sequenced by a RISC-V instruction stream, but which contains additional architectural state and instruction-set extensions, and possibly some limited autonomy relative to the primary RISC-V instruction stream.
We use the term accelerator to refer to either a non-programmable fixed-function unit or a core that can operate autonomously but is specialized for certain tasks. In RISC-V systems, we expect many programmable accelerators will be RISC-V-based cores with specialized instruction-set extensions and/or customized coprocessors. An important class of RISC-V accelerators are I/O accelerators, which offload I/O processing tasks from the main application cores.
The system-level organization of a RISC-V hardware platform can range from a single-core microcontroller to a many-thousand-node cluster of shared-memory manycore server nodes. Even small systems-on-a-chip might be structured as a hierarchy of multicomputers and/or multiprocessors to modularize development effort or to provide secure isolation between subsystems.
The behavior of a RISC-V program depends on the execution environment in which it runs. A RISC-V execution environment interface (EEI) defines the initial state of the program, the number and type of harts in the environment including the privilege modes supported by the harts, the accessibility and attributes of memory and I/O regions, the behavior of all legal instructions executed on each hart (i.e., the ISA is one component of the EEI), and the handling of any interrupts or exceptions raised during execution including environment calls. Examples of EEIs include the Linux application binary interface (ABI), or the RISC-V supervisor binary interface (SBI). The implementation of a RISC-V execution environment can be pure hardware, pure software, or a combination of hardware and software. For example, opcode traps and software emulation can be used to implement functionality not provided in hardware. Examples of execution environment implementations include:
“Bare metal” hardware platforms where harts are directly implemented by physical processor threads and instructions have full access to the physical address space. The hardware platform defines an execution environment that begins at power-on reset.
RISC-V operating systems that provide multiple user-level execution environments by multiplexing user-level harts onto available physical processor threads and by controlling access to memory via virtual memory.
RISC-V hypervisors that provide multiple supervisor-level execution environments for guest operating systems.
RISC-V emulators, such as Spike, QEMU or rv8, which emulate RISC-V harts on an underlying x86 system, and which can provide either a user-level or a supervisor-level execution environment.
A bare hardware platform can be considered to define an EEI, where the accessible harts, memory, and other devices populate the environment, and the initial state is that at power-on reset. Generally, most software is designed to use a more abstract interface to the hardware, as more abstract EEIs provide greater portability across different hardware platforms. Often EEIs are layered on top of one another, where one higher-level EEI uses another lower-level EEI.
From the perspective of software running in a given execution environment, a hart is a resource that autonomously fetches and executes RISC-V instructions within that execution environment. In this respect, a hart behaves like a hardware thread resource even if time-multiplexed onto real hardware by the execution environment. Some EEIs support the creation and destruction of additional harts, for example, via environment calls to fork new harts.
The term hart was introduced in the work on Lithe [lithe-pan-hotpar09 lithe-pan-pldi10] to provide a term to represent an abstract execution resource as opposed to a software thread programming abstraction.
The important distinction between a hardware thread (hart) and a software thread context is that the software running inside an execution environment is not responsible for causing progress of each of its harts; that is the responsibility of the outer execution environment. So the environment’s harts operate like hardware threads from the perspective of the software inside the execution environment.
An execution environment implementation might time-multiplex a set of guest harts onto fewer host harts provided by its own execution environment but must do so in a way that guest harts operate like independent hardware threads. In particular, if there are more guest harts than host harts then the execution environment must be able to preempt the guest harts and must not wait indefinitely for guest software on a guest hart to "yield" control of the guest hart.
A RISC-V ISA is defined as a base integer ISA, which must be present in any implementation, plus optional extensions to the base ISA. The base integer ISAs are very similar to that of the early RISC processors except with no branch delay slots and with support for optional variable-length instruction encodings. A base is carefully restricted to a minimal set of instructions sufficient to provide a reasonable target for compilers, assemblers, linkers, and operating systems (with additional privileged operations), and so provides a convenient ISA and software toolchain “skeleton” around which more customized processor ISAs can be built.
Although it is convenient to speak of the RISC-V ISA, RISC-V is actually a family of related ISAs, of which there are currently four base ISAs. Each base integer instruction set is characterized by the width of the integer registers and the corresponding size of the address space and by the number of integer registers. There are two primary base integer variants, RV32I and RV64I, described in Chapters [rv32] and [rv64], which provide 32-bit or 64-bit address spaces respectively. We use the term XLEN to refer to the width of an integer register in bits (either 32 or 64). Chapter [rv32e] describes the RV32E subset variant of the RV32I base instruction set, which has been added to support small microcontrollers, and which has half the number of integer registers. Chapter [rv128] sketches a future RV128I variant of the base integer instruction set supporting a flat 128-bit address space (XLEN=128). The base integer instruction sets use a two’s-complement representation for signed integer values.
Although 64-bit address spaces are a requirement for larger systems, we believe 32-bit address spaces will remain adequate for many embedded and client devices for decades to come and will be desirable to lower memory traffic and energy consumption. In addition, 32-bit address spaces are sufficient for educational purposes. A larger flat 128-bit address space might eventually be required, so we ensured this could be accommodated within the RISC-V ISA framework.
The four base ISAs in RISC-V are treated as distinct base ISAs. A common question is why is there not a single ISA, and in particular, why is RV32I not a strict subset of RV64I? Some earlier ISA designs (SPARC, MIPS) adopted a strict superset policy when increasing address space size to support running existing 32-bit binaries on new 64-bit hardware.
The main advantage of explicitly separating base ISAs is that each base ISA can be optimized for its needs without requiring to support all the operations needed for other base ISAs. For example, RV64I can omit instructions and CSRs that are only needed to cope with the narrower registers in RV32I. The RV32I variants can use encoding space otherwise reserved for instructions only required by wider address-space variants.
The main disadvantage of not treating the design as a single ISA is that it complicates the hardware needed to emulate one base ISA on another (e.g., RV32I on RV64I). However, differences in addressing and illegal instruction traps generally mean some mode switch would be required in hardware in any case even with full superset instruction encodings, and the different RISC-V base ISAs are similar enough that supporting multiple versions is relatively low cost. Although some have proposed that the strict superset design would allow legacy 32-bit libraries to be linked with 64-bit code, this is impractical in practice, even with compatible encodings, due to the differences in software calling conventions and system-call interfaces.
The RISC-V privileged architecture provides fields in misa to control the unprivileged ISA at each level to support emulating
different base ISAs on the same hardware. We note that newer SPARC
and MIPS ISA revisions have deprecated support for running 32-bit code
unchanged on 64-bit systems.
A related question is why there is a different encoding for 32-bit adds in RV32I (ADD) and RV64I (ADDW)? The ADDW opcode could be used for 32-bit adds in RV32I and ADDD for 64-bit adds in RV64I, instead of the existing design which uses the same opcode ADD for 32-bit adds in RV32I and 64-bit adds in RV64I with a different opcode ADDW for 32-bit adds in RV64I. This would also be more consistent with the use of the same LW opcode for 32-bit load in both RV32I and RV64I. The very first versions of RISC-V ISA did have a variant of this alternate design, but the RISC-V design was changed to the current choice in January 2011. Our focus was on supporting 32-bit integers in the 64-bit ISA not on providing compatibility with the 32-bit ISA, and the motivation was to remove the asymmetry that arose from having not all opcodes in RV32I have a *W suffix (e.g., ADDW, but AND not ANDW). In hindsight, this was perhaps not well-justified and a consequence of designing both ISAs at the same time as opposed to adding one later to sit on top of another, and also from a belief we had to fold platform requirements into the ISA spec which would imply that all the RV32I instructions would have been required in RV64I. It is too late to change the encoding now, but this is also of little practical consequence for the reasons stated above.
It has been noted we could enable the *W variants as an extension to RV32I systems to provide a common encoding across RV64I and a future RV32 variant.
RISC-V has been designed to support extensive customization and specialization. Each base integer ISA can be extended with one or more optional instruction-set extensions, and we divide each RISC-V instruction-set encoding space (and related encoding spaces such as the CSRs) into three disjoint categories: standard, reserved, and custom. Standard encodings are defined by the Foundation, and shall not conflict with other standard extensions for the same base ISA. Reserved encodings are currently not defined but are saved for future standard extensions. We use the term non-standard to describe an extension that is not defined by the Foundation. Custom encodings shall never be used for standard extensions and are made available for vendor-specific non-standard extensions. We use the term non-conforming to describe a non-standard extension that uses either a standard or a reserved encoding (i.e., custom extensions are not non-conforming). Instruction-set extensions are generally shared but may provide slightly different functionality depending on the base ISA. Chapter [extensions] describes various ways of extending the RISC-V ISA. We have also developed a naming convention for RISC-V base instructions and instruction-set extensions, described in detail in Chapter [naming].
To support more general software development, a set of standard extensions are defined to provide integer multiply/divide, atomic operations, and single and double-precision floating-point arithmetic. The base integer ISA is named “I” (prefixed by RV32 or RV64 depending on integer register width), and contains integer computational instructions, integer loads, integer stores, and control-flow instructions. The standard integer multiplication and division extension is named “M”, and adds instructions to multiply and divide values held in the integer registers. The standard atomic instruction extension, denoted by “A”, adds instructions that atomically read, modify, and write memory for inter-processor synchronization. The standard single-precision floating-point extension, denoted by “F”, adds floating-point registers, single-precision computational instructions, and single-precision loads and stores. The standard double-precision floating-point extension, denoted by “D”, expands the floating-point registers, and adds double-precision computational instructions, loads, and stores. An integer base plus these four standard extensions (“IMAFD”) is given the abbreviation “G” and provides a general-purpose scalar instruction set. The standard “C” compressed instruction extension provides narrower 16-bit forms of common instructions.
Beyond the base integer ISA and the standard GC extensions, we believe it is rare that a new instruction will provide a significant benefit for all applications, although it may be very beneficial for a certain domain. As energy efficiency concerns are forcing greater specialization, we believe it is important to simplify the required portion of an ISA specification. Whereas other architectures usually treat their ISA as a single entity, which changes to a new version as instructions are added over time, RISC-V will endeavor to keep the base and each standard extension constant over time, and instead layer new instructions as further optional extensions. For example, the base integer ISAs will continue as fully supported standalone ISAs, regardless of any subsequent extensions.
The base RISC-V ISA has fixed-length 32-bit instructions that must be naturally aligned on 32-bit boundaries. However, the standard RISC-V encoding scheme is designed to support ISA extensions with variable-length instructions, where each instruction can be any number of 16-bit instruction parcels in length and parcels are naturally aligned on 16-bit boundaries. The standard compressed ISA extension described in Chapter [compressed] reduces code size by providing compressed 16-bit instructions and relaxes the alignment constraints to allow all instructions (16 bit and 32 bit) to be aligned on any 16-bit boundary to improve code density.
We use the term IALIGN (measured in bits) to refer to the instruction-address alignment constraint the implementation enforces. IALIGN is 32 bits in the base ISA, but some ISA extensions, including the compressed ISA extension, relax IALIGN to 16 bits. IALIGN may not take on any value other than 16 or 32.
We use the term ILEN (measured in bits) to refer to the maximum instruction length supported by an implementation, and which is always a multiple of IALIGN. For implementations supporting only a base instruction set, ILEN is 32 bits. Implementations supporting longer instructions have larger values of ILEN.
Figure 1.1 illustrates the standard RISC-V
instruction-length encoding convention. All the 32-bit instructions
in the base ISA have their lowest two bits set to 11. The
optional compressed 16-bit instruction-set extensions have their
lowest two bits equal to 00, 01, or 10. Standard
instruction-set extensions encoded with more than 32 bits have
additional low-order bits set to 1, with the conventions for
48-bit and 64-bit lengths shown in Figure 1.1.
Instruction lengths between 80 bits and 176 bits are encoded using a
3-bit field in bits [14:12] giving the number of 16-bit words in
addition to the first 5×16-bit words. The encoding with bits
[14:12] set to 111 is reserved for future longer instruction
encodings.
Given the code size and energy savings of a compressed format, we wanted to build in support for a compressed format to the ISA encoding scheme rather than adding this as an afterthought, but to allow simpler implementations we didn’t want to make the compressed format mandatory. We also wanted to optionally allow longer instructions to support experimentation and larger instruction-set extensions. Although our encoding convention required a tighter encoding of the core RISC-V ISA, this has several beneficial effects.
An implementation of the standard G ISA need only hold the most-significant 30 bits in instruction caches (a 6.25% saving). On instruction cache refills, any instructions encountered with either low bit clear should be recoded into illegal 30-bit instructions before storing in the cache to preserve illegal instruction exception behavior.
Perhaps more importantly, by condensing our base ISA into a subset of the 32-bit instruction word, we leave more space available for non-standard and custom extensions. In particular, the base RV32I ISA uses less than 1/8 of the encoding space in the 32-bit instruction word. As described in Chapter [extensions], an implementation that does not require support for the standard compressed instruction extension can map 3 additional non-conforming 30-bit instruction spaces into the 32-bit fixed-width format, while preserving support for standard ≥32-bit instruction-set extensions. Further, if the implementation also does not need instructions >32-bits in length, it can recover a further four major opcodes for non-conforming extensions.
Encodings with bits [15:0] all zeros are defined as illegal instructions. These instructions are considered to be of minimal length: 16 bits if any 16-bit instruction-set extension is present, otherwise 32 bits. The encoding with bits [ILEN-1:0] all ones is also illegal; this instruction is considered to be ILEN bits long.
We consider it a feature that any length of instruction containing all zero bits is not legal, as this quickly traps erroneous jumps into zeroed memory regions. Similarly, we also reserve the instruction encoding containing all ones to be an illegal instruction, to catch the other common pattern observed with unprogrammed non-volatile memory devices, disconnected memory buses, or broken memory devices.
Software can rely on a naturally aligned 32-bit word containing zero to act as an illegal instruction on all RISC-V implementations, to be used by software where an illegal instruction is explicitly desired. Defining a corresponding known illegal value for all ones is more difficult due to the variable-length encoding. Software cannot generally use the illegal value of ILEN bits of all 1s, as software might not know ILEN for the eventual target machine (e.g., if software is compiled into a standard binary library used by many different machines). Defining a 32-bit word of all ones as illegal was also considered, as all machines must support a 32-bit instruction size, but this requires the instruction-fetch unit on machines with ILEN>32 report an illegal instruction exception rather than access fault when such an instruction borders a protection boundary, complicating variable-instruction-length fetch and decode.
RISC-V base ISAs have little-endian memory systems. Instructions are stored in memory with each 16-bit parcel stored in a memory halfword. Parcels forming one instruction are stored at increasing halfword addresses, with the lowest-addressed parcel holding the lowest-numbered bits in the instruction specification.
We chose little-endian byte ordering for the RISC-V memory system because little-endian systems are currently dominant commercially (all x86 systems; iOS, Android, and Windows for ARM). A minor point is that we have also found little-endian memory systems to be more natural for hardware designers. However, certain application areas, such as IP networking, operate on big-endian data structures, and certain legacy code bases have been built assuming big-endian processors, so we expect that future specifications will describe big-endian or bi-endian variants of RISC-V.
We have to fix the order in which instruction parcels are stored in memory, independent of memory system endianness, to ensure that the length-encoding bits always appear first in halfword address order. This allows the length of a variable-length instruction to be quickly determined by an instruction-fetch unit by examining only the first few bits of the first 16-bit instruction parcel. Once we had decided to fix on a native little-endian memory system and instruction parcel ordering, this naturally led to placing the length-encoding bits in the LSB positions of the instruction format to avoid breaking up opcode fields.
We use the term exception to refer to an unusual condition occurring at run time associated with an instruction in the current RISC-V hart. We use the term interrupt to refer to an external asynchronous event that may cause a RISC-V hart to experience an unexpected transfer of control. We use the term trap to refer to the transfer of control to a trap handler caused by either an exception or an interrupt.
The instruction descriptions in following chapters describe conditions that can raise an exception during execution. The general behavior of most RISC-V EEIs is that a trap to some handler occurs when an exception is signaled on an instruction (except for floating-point exceptions, which, in the standard floating-point extensions, do not cause traps). The manner in which interrupts are generated, routed to, and enabled by a hart depends on the EEI.
Our use of “exception” and “trap” is compatible with that in the IEEE-754 floating-point standard.
How traps are handled and made visible to software running on the hart depends on the enclosing execution environment. From the perspective of software running inside an execution environment, traps encountered by a hart at runtime can have four different effects:
The trap is visible to, and handled by, software running inside the execution environment. For example, in an EEI providing both supervisor and user mode on harts, an ECALL by a user-mode hart will generally result in a transfer of control to a supervisor-mode handler running on the same hart. Similarly, in the same environment, when a hart is interrupted, an interrupt handler will be run in supervisor mode on the hart.
The trap is a synchronous exception that is an explicit call to the execution environment requesting an action of behalf of software inside the execution environment. An example is a system call. In this case, execution may or may not resume on the hart after the requested action is taken by the execution environment. For example, a system call could remove the hart or cause an orderly termination of the entire execution environment.
The trap is handled transparently by the execution environment and execution resumes normally after the trap is handled. Examples include emulating missing instructions, handling non-resident page faults in a demand-paged virtual-memory system, or handling device interrupts for a different job in a multiprogrammed machine. In these cases, the software running inside the execution environment is not aware of the trap (we ignore timing effects in these definitions).
The trap represents a fatal failure and causes the execution environment to terminate execution. Examples include failing a virtual-memory page-protection check or allowing a watchdog timer to expire. Each EEI should define how execution is terminated and reported to an external environment.
The following table shows the characteristics of each kind of trap:
| Contained | Requested | Invisible | Fatal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Execution terminates? | N | N1 | N | Y |
| Software is oblivious? | N | N | Y | Y2 |
| Handled by environment? | N | Y | Y | Y |
The EEI defines for each trap whether it is handled precisely, though the recommendation is to maintain preciseness where possible. Contained and requested traps can be observed to be imprecise by software inside the execution environment. Invisible traps, by definition, cannot be observed to be precise or imprecise by software running inside the execution environment. Fatal traps can be observed to be imprecise by software running inside the execution environment, if known-errorful instructions do not cause immediate termination.
Because this document describes unprivileged instructions, traps are rarely mentioned. Architectural means to handle contained traps are defined in the privileged architecture manual, along with other features to support richer EEIs. Unprivileged instructions that are defined solely to cause requested traps are documented here. Invisible traps are, by their nature, out of scope for this document. Instruction encodings that are not defined here and not defined by some other means may cause a fatal trap.
Commentary on our design decisions is formatted as in this paragraph. This non-normative text can be skipped if the reader is only interested in the specification itself.