Sailing Downstream

About the Organization

Background: Current flows from RISC-V Sail specification to downstream implementations have manual steps which are time-consuming and can introduce errors.A lack of familiarity with Sail and OCaml presents a barrier to adoption of Sail as the basis for automated downstream implementations: emulators, simulators, compilers, assemblers, disassemblers, instruction stream tools, documentation, etc. Proposal: - Create an accessible Sail backend. - Extract salient information. - Transform it into an accessible database (JSON). - Survey projects dependent on RISC-V ISA for how that dependency is realized. - Utilize JSON to directly and automatically generate downstream source that is currently generated by hand. - Create a React-based interactive RISC-V ISA reference by directly importing the JSON database. Benefits: The backend can serve as a model for creation of additional Sail backends. The JSON database itself may be sufficient for many downstream uses. Creating downstream source shows feasibility, and a process for a fully-automated downstream flow. Additional collaboration with the effort to transform Sail into documentation is warranted. Much of the effort to transform Sail into JSON is complete, but there is still significant effort ahead: - enhanced parsing - enhancing the RISC-V Sail specification itself with more required content Much of the effort in creating an interactive web site is complete, but there is work to support the incorporation, display, and filtering.