JamaicaVM for RISC-V

aicas and SiFive Bridge Flexibility and Performance with RISC-V, JamaicaVM Integration​

AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 running on a SiFive RISC-V unmatched board

Embedded. Environment. Edge – Demonstration of porting AWS IoT Greengrass V2 on RISC-V.

JamaicaVM is a realtime-capable VM designed for embedded systems. Since its inception, it was ported to over 15 target platforms and operating system combinations.

The key to this are:

  • the easily portable ahead of time compiler
  • the VM-internal operating system abstraction
  • and the JamaicaVM OS Porting Interface.

“The need for extensibility in custom embedded system applications is closely tied to the need for verification, simulators, debuggers, compilers libraries, monitors, kernels, and more.”

This makes ports to different CPU architectures for already supported operating systems very simple. A proof-of-concept port to Linux RISC-V took a developer less than a day of work. This did not require changes to the interpreter, but included support for compiling codes using JamaicaVM’s ahead-of-time compiler.

Due to the abstraction provided by the OS Porting Interface, ports to new operating systems are also simplified, particularly when the new OS is similar to one or more existing ports, e.g., the OS providing some degree of POSIX compatibility.

“The inherent modularity of RISC-V and JamaicaVM provides more latitude for building and managing smarter, more efficient systems, enabling developers to accomplish things that would not be possible with proprietary solutions.”

SiFive is the leading provider of processor cores, accelerators, and SoC IP to create domain-specific architecture based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. SiFive offers scalable, configurable processor cores pre-integrated with security, trace, and debug features for workload-specific accelerator designs.

The RISC-V ecosystem is rapidly expanding as developers embrace extensible software and hardware freedom for CPU architectures.

“The adoption of the RISC-V ecosystem is driven by the need to reduce time to market and development costs. Pre-integrating JamaicaVM provides added layers that help developers reduce the interoperability and performance risks that come with rapidly developing and deploying custom embedded systems.”

Platform Support

AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0
right now supports:

  • Linux/x86
  • Linux/ARMv7
  • Linux/ARMv8
  • Mac/intel64
  • Win/x86
  • FreeBSD/x86

aicas adds:
 

  • Linux/RISC-V
  • VxWorks/x86
  • VxWorks/ARMv7
  • VxWorks/ARMv8
  • QNX/x86
  • QNX/ARMv7
  • QNX/ARMv8
RELATED INFORMATION
 

JamaicaVM for RISC-V Evaluation Request