Monthly Archives: F Y

Linux syscall and RISC-V assembly

Sample of RISC-V assembly code

Syscall in Linux kernel, is an interface to access to kernel basic functions. They are described in section 2 of man pages. The introduction is in man 2 syscall (indirect system call), and the list of functions are described in man 2 syscalls. Update: System Calls in lectures of official Linux kernel documentation including “Linux system calls implementation”, “VDSO and virtual syscalls” and “Accessing user space from system calls”

This article follow previous one about RISC-V overall progress and available tools to play with, I will try to make a short article here about Linux syscall usage and the RISC-V assembly case.

Table of Content

* Description section of the man page
* Getting the list of function and how to access them
* Passing parameters
* Function number and registers of return values
* Return values and error code
* Compiling and executing on virtual environment
* Update: Bronzebeard assembler and its baremetal environment for real hardware

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RISC-V overall progress

WordPress is so cumbersome (brut long text in SQL DB and other misconception (WTF?), buggy (especially to multilingual content missing) and hard to maintain on long term that I didn’t posted for long time I want to migrate. You can test the new log engine (here specialised in TIC-80 256 bytes code on https://256b.popolon.org/.

I continued my travel toward RISC-V I started as said in a previous post in may 2018.

RISC-V Benefits

Among the benefit of RISC-V beside other implementations:
* Open source and without license fee availability, allowing everyone to participate, implement and have full specifications
* Highest modularity for a processor in specifications, You can reduce the core to only the set of functions you want for a specific tasks, allowing less transistor/more compact specialized cores, and then multiply cores with some specialized in some kind of tasks.
* Vector extension

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