Seal5

[!NOTE] Starting July 11, 2024 we will be offering (monthly) Seal5 Development/User meetings.

Click here for details (slides, next dates,...), if you are interested!

[!NOTE] Seal5 was recently presented at the RISC-V Summit Europe 2024. Click here to access the poster, slides & recording.

Our Seal5 paper was published and presented on the DSD 2024 conference: See References section for details.

Overview

The RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is popular for its extensibility. However, a quick exploration of instruction candidates fails due to the lack of tools to auto-generate embedded software toolchain support. Seal5 work establishes a semi-automated flow to generate LLVM compiler support for custom instructions based on the CoreDSL2 ISA description language. Seal5 is capable of generating support for functionalities ranging from baseline assembler-level support, over builtin functions to compiler code generation patterns for scalar as well as vector instructions, while requiring no deeper compiler know-how.

Eliminating manual efforts for Retargeting is crutial for the automated exploration of custom RISC-V instructions as depicted in the following image. Seal5's code-generation support allows to make use of custom instructions without needing to make changes to the programs/benchmarks source code (i.e. adding inline-assembly calls).

Prerequisites

To be able to run the examples, make sure to clone the Seal5 repo using the --recursive flag. Otherwise run the following command to fetch (and update) the referenced submodules.

sh git submodule update --init --recursive

Ubuntu Packages

First, a set of APT packages needs to be installed:

sh sudo apt install python3-pip python3-venv cmake make ninja-build

Python Requirements

First, setup a virtual environment with Python v3.8 or newer.

Install all required python packages using the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt.

For development (linting, packaging,...) there are a few more dependencies which can be installed via:

pip install -r requirements_dev.txt.

System Requirements

The initial cloning of the llvm-project repo will take a long time, hence a good internet connection is recommended. To run the demo, make sure to have at least 20GB (>40GB for debug builds) of disk space available in the destination (/tmp/seal5_llvm_demo) directory. The target directory can be changed as follows: DEST=$HOME/seal5_demo.

Installation

Warning: It is highly recommended to install seal5 into a new virtual environment. Follow these steps to initialize and enter a venv in your seal5 repo directory:

```sh

alternative: python3 -m venv venv

virtualenv -p python3.8 venv source venv/bin/activate ```

From PyPI

pip install seal5

Local Development Version

First prepare your shell by executing export PYTHONPATH=$(pwd):$PYTHONPATH inside the seal5 repository. Then you should be able to use Seal5 without needing to reinstall it.

Alternatively you should be able to use pip install -e ..

Usage

Python API

The flow can be sketched as follows (see Example below for functional code!):

```python

Create flow

seal5_flow = Seal5Flow(...)

Initialize LLVM repo and .seal5 directories

seal5_flow.initialize(...)

Optional: remove artifacts from previous builds

seal5_flow.reset(...)

Install Seal5 dependencies (CDSL2LLVM/PatternGen)

seal5_flow.setup(...)

Load CoreDSL2+CFG files (Git config, filters,...)

seal5_flow.load(...)

Transform Seal5 model (Extract side effects, operands,...)

seal5_flow.transform(...)

Generate patches based on Seal5 model (ISel patterns, RISC-V features,...)

seal5_flow.generate(...)

Apply generated (and manual) patches to LLVM codebase

seal5_flow.patch(...)

Build patches LLVM (This will take a while)

seal5_flow.build(...)

Run LLVM+Seal5 tests to verify functionality

seal5_flow.test(...)

Combine patches and install LLVM

seal5_flow.deploy(...)

Archive final LLVM (optionally inclusing logs, reports,...)

seal5_flow.export(...)

Optional: Cleanup all artifacts

seal5_flow.cleanup(...) ```

Command-Line Interface

Command line interface is aligned with the Python API. See examples/demo.sh for an full usage example

sh export SEAL5_HOME=... seal5 --dir $SEAL5_HOME reset --settings seal5 init [--non-interactive] [-c] seal5 load --files ... seal5 setup ... seal5 transform ... seal5 generate ... seal5 patch ... seal5 build ... seal5 test ... seal5 deploy ... seal5 export ... seal5 clean [--temp] [--patches] [--models] [--inputs]

Examples

See examples/demo.py for example of end-to-end flow!

Documentation

Checkout Seal5's ReadTheDocs Page!

Limitations

See here.

CI/CD Flow

We added a (manual) CI job to run the examples/demo.py script via GitHub actions.

Contributions

Seal5 issue tracker: https://github.com/tum-ei-eda/seal5/issues

CoreDSL2LLVM/PatternGen issue tracker: https://github.com/mathis-s/CoreDSL2LLVM/issues

References

• Seal5: Semi-Automated LLVM Support for RISC-V ISA Extensions Including Autovectorization (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10741856)

2024 27th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD)

BibTeX

bibtex @inproceedings{van2024seal5, title={Seal5: Semi-Automated LLVM Support for RISC-V ISA Extensions Including Autovectorization}, author={Van Kempen, Philipp and Salmen, Mathis and Mueller-Gritschneder, Daniel and Schlichtmann, Ulf}, booktitle={2024 27th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD)}, pages={335--342}, year={2024}, organization={IEEE} }

Acknowledgment

This research is partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the projects Scale4Edge (grant number 16ME0465) and MANNHEIM-FlexKI (grant number 01IS22086L).