RISC-V emulator docker image

A pre-configured QEMU & Debian RISC-V image. Allows you to get started working on an emulated RISC-V environment. Is a quick way to see what libraries and frameworks work on RISC-V without sourcing hardware.

Structure:

• Debian host (debian:sid)
  • QEMU. Running as emulated RISC-V with soft-mmu support
    • Debian guest. RISC-V image
    • RISC-V u-boot kernel

How to use

Quicker start, with Docker Hub:

Pull and run the image from Docker Hub. Saves you needing to build locally

• https://hub.docker.com/r/davidburela/riscv-emulator

Quick start:

Get the the image

# 1 Get the image [2 options]
# 1A. Pull the image from Docker Hub
docker pull davidburela/riscv-emulator

# 1B. -OR- build the image locally
docker build -t davidburela/riscv-emulator .

# 2. 
# Run with QEMU default of 2CPU & 2G ram. 
# Expose port 2222 which is routed through into the QEMU RISC-V guest
docker run -d --publish 127.0.0.1:2222:2222/tcp davidburela/riscv-emulator

# 3. SSH directly into the QEMU RISC-V guest, the default password is "root". (Might take a few minutes for guest to start)
ssh root@localhost -p 2222

Options (RAM, CPU, etc)

# 2. Alternative: Allocate more CPU / RAM to QEMU guest
# Start the container, and manually start QEMU with the required specs.
# replace AAAA with desired cpus (e.g. 2 or 4)
# replace BBBB with desired RAM (e.g. 2G or 4G)
docker run -d --publish 127.0.0.1:2222:2222/tcp davidburela/riscv-emulator qemu-system-riscv64 -smp AAAA -m BBBB -cpu rv64 -nographic -machine virt -kernel /usr/lib/u-boot/qemu-riscv64_smode/uboot.elf -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd -drive file=dqib_riscv64-virt/image.qcow2,if=none,id=hd -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net -netdev user,id=net,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 -object rng-random,filename=/dev/urandom,id=rng -device virtio-rng-device,rng=rng -append "root=LABEL=rootfs console=ttyS0"

Podman

Declare docker.io registry declared in /etc/containers/registries.conf, i.e.

[registries.search]
registries = [ 'docker.io', 'quay.io' ]

Build with

podman build -t riscv-emulator

For other docker sub-commands, just replace docker with podman

Example uses

I have used the emulated environment to verify if Open Source projects run on RISC-V, and shared the findings:

• Golang
• IPFS
• Ethereum

How it was built

• Was built based on the steps in my blog post https://blog.davidburela.com/2020/11/15/emulating-risc-v-debian-on-wsl2/
• Utilising Giovanni Mascellani’s prebaked Debian images