OpenRISC Tutorials

These are tutorials for the OpenRISC processor. The simulations run on different FPGA boards and simulators. Hence, the different tutorials have different requirements, which you can find in the list below. If you have downloaded the tutorials and are new to OpenRISC, you probably want the real quick start.

Quick Start

This is the real quick start if you have downloaded and extracted the tutorials. The output files are already part of what you have downloaded, but you still need some tools. You can install prebuilt versions of them:

./bootstrap-quick-start.sh

This downloads all free and open tools. Unfortunately, you will still need to install closed (but free) tools from the FPGA vendors:

• Altera Quartus Prime for Altera FPGAs (DE0 nano.

You can now start with the tutorials.

Set Environment

Once you have installed the dependencies, you can do the following tutorials. For convenience, you can set the environment variables for all tools downloaded and installed automatically:

source environment.sh

Tutorials

There are simulations and FPGA boards supported, and some general tutorials help you working with the OpenRISC ecosystem.

Simulations

• or1ksim, dependencies:
  • For running: or1ksim
  • For building own software: toolchain

FPGA Boards

• Terasic DE0 nano board, dependencies:
  • For running: OpenOCD, toolchain, Altera Quartus Prime
  • For building hardware: FuseSoC

Debug Environment

The OpenRISC cpu, simulator and toolchain provide a full debugging environment with gdb and OpenOCD. At a low level this is provided with adv_debug_sys which provides jtag interface for OpenOCD to talk to. Much debugging can be done directly in OpenOCD. GDB communicates with OpenOCD to provide a familiar debugging environment for programmers. For more details see:

• Debugging OpenRISC

Tools (partially required)

OpenOCD

The OpenOCD version delivered with the Linux distributions is most probably outdated. Hence, you can quickly install a current version inside the tutorials:

make openocd-download

In case you cannot start openocd, you may rebuilt it also:

make openocd-build

Toolchain

The OpenRISC software tool chain consists of all the tools require to compile and manipulate software for the platform. Specifically, the tool chain which is considered the development version will be used to compile code to run on the "bare metal" system. That is, with no underlying operating system.

You will need the toolchain if you want to compile software. The quick way just to play around with this tutorials is to run from the base path:

make toolchain-baremetal

FuseSoC

FuseSoC is an automated build environment and package manager for OpenRISC. You can install it as described here (recommended) or use the prebuilt binaries:

make fusesoc-download

You can also built it in this tutorial path:

make fusesoc-build

or1ksim

or1ksim is the OpenRISC instruction set simulator. You can download the prebuilt binary:

make or1ksim-download

or build it here:

make or1ksim-build

Linux

There is a prebuilt Linux image you can simply download:

make linux-download

Altera Quartus Prime

This is the software which compiles RTL and ultimately generates an FPGA programming file. Unfortunately this software is closed source, extremely large, and requires registration to download. However, it is required.

For downloading the free version, visit the Altera website and download the latest version of Quartus Prime Lite. It is 4.5GB in size and will obviously take a while to download. Once it is downloaded, extract it and run the setup.sh file in there. Install it to any location (e.g. /opt/altera/lite).

After installation add the following path (corrected for your installation) to the search path:

export PATH=/opt/altera/lite/15.1/quartus/bin/:$PATH

Note: Make sure you select to include the Cyclone IV E device families during installation.