Rocket Stage

[seldridge]

The new Stage/Phase framework is available with an updated DependencyAPI coming in FIRRTL 1.3. This issue covers migrating the existing freechips.rocketchip.system.Generator object to a new RocketStage consisting of phases derived from the existing steps used to build RocketChip.

See: https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip/blob/1cf70ea21810887828be70da8239366c97feb0cc/src/main/scala/system/Generator.scala#L106

This would benefit from support for a RunPhaseAnnotation that would then allow injection of new phases into the Rocket Chip generation process.

This is intended to be command-line compatible with Rocket Chip's existing positional arguments (https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip/blob/master/src/main/scala/util/GeneratorUtils.scala#L80). A follow-on PR could move these to something with actual arguments as opposed to positions.

Random cool thing with this is that it would allow you to build a Rocket Chip fat jar that could support simple core configurations, e.g., :

./utils/bin/rocket-chip --cores 2 --core-uarch boom --roccs hwacha,gemmini

Or that could be used as a command line interface to build an anonymous context dependent environment config stack:

./utils/bin/rocket-chip --config WithRV32,DefaultConfig

Type of issue: feature request

Impact: API modification

Development Phase: proposal

[davidmlw]

It is a cool feature. Will rocketchip get back to this idea?

[sequencer]

No, rocketchip will be split to smaller libraries, and user should handle the build flow on their own.