Overview
SiFive started the Kami Processor project in 2018 intending to develop a canonical model of the RISC-V specification. While working at SiFive, I was the primary developer for Kami Processor.
The Kami processor supports the following RISC-V extensions: I, M, A, D, F, C, S, U, Zifencei, and Zcsr. This means that the Kami processor supports the mandatory core set of integer arithmetic and logic instructions prescribed by the RISC-V ISA (I). In addition, it supports integer multiplication (M), atomic memory operations (A), 64 bit floating point operations (D), 32 bit floating point operations (F), compressed instruction encodings (C), multi threaded synchronization support (ZiFencei), and support for RISC-V's control status register operations (Zicsr).
The Kami Processor includes a page table walker which allows applications to translate between physical and virtual memory addresses. Kami Processor includes a translation look-aside buffer that caches address translations in a buffer that uses a pseudo-LRU allocation algorithm.
The RISC-V spec defines several virtual memory modes. These are denoted by a code that indicates the size of the words used to encode virtual addresses. For example, "sv39" indicates that the virtual addresses are 39 bits wide. The Kami Processor supports virtual address modes sv32, sv39, and sv48.
The RISC-V memory protection model prescribes a physical memory protection scheme based around physical protection control status registers (PMP CSRs). The Kami Processor supports the full suite of PMP CSRs and all of the RISC-V address matching schemes, namely: top of range (TOR), naturally aligned four-byte regions (NA4), and naturally aligned power of two regions (NAPOT). Its address granularity is configurable.
I wrote the Kami Processor to use the TileLink interchip communication protocol. The TileLink protocol defines a set of conformance levels. Kami Processor's device interface communicates using the TileLink Uncached Heavyweight (TL-UH) message protocol. This protocol extends the basic read and write messages provided by the TileLink Uncached Lightweight (TL-UL) message protocol by adding atomic memory operations. By supporting the TileLink protocol, the Kami Processor can be integrated into systems using a number of interchip bus protocols either directly or through a conversion bridge.
Read the following report to learn more about the Kami Processor.