Getting Started
To get started with using RISC-V and Rust together, we will need a couple of things.
- Cross-compilation linker
- ISA emulation environment
- Rust toolchain for RISC-V
Cross-compilation linker
It is generally advised to install the GNU RISC-V Toolchain for the corresponding target. This differs between from target to target. Generally, it is advised to install both the RV32 and RV64 versions. These can found here.
Below is a table for different platforms and which commands can be executed to get the RISC-V GNU Toolchain.
| Platform | Command | Link |
|---|---|---|
| ArchLinux | paru -S riscv-gnu-toolchain-bin | Link |
| Ubuntu Linux | Install from source | |
| macOS | brew tap riscv-software-src/riscv && brew install riscv-tools | Link |
ISA emulation environment
- QEMU
- Spike
Rust toolchain for RISC-V
Rust supports several variants of the RISC-V instruction set. All the targets can be listed with the following command.
rustup target list | grep '^riscv'
The target determines the register sizes and which instructions to use. For
example, the riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf target includes the m
(Multiplication), a (Atomics) and c (Compressed) instructions, where the
riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf target only includes the base instructions.
To install the toolchain for a specific target, you can run the following command.
# Replace 'riscv64gc-unknown-linux-gnu' with the desired target
rustup target add riscv64gc-unknown-linux-gnu