GUI-VP Kit: A RISC-V VP Meets Linux Graphics - Enabling Interactive Graphical Application Development

Today, Virtual Prototypes (VPs) are heavily used to enable early software development and to accelerate the design process. The aim of this work is twofold: (i) enable the early development of interactive graphical applications running on Linux, and (ii) provide an easy-to-use and configurable solution for RISC-V. In this thesis, we present GUI-VP Kit. GUI-VP Kit includes GUI-VP, a greatly extended and improved RISC-V VP, as well as configurations to build a runnable Linux environment, and input/output drivers that form the interface between peripherals and Linux applications. In our experiments employing GUI-VP Kit, we show that X, Qt and SDL applications can be executed in GUI-VP using a VNC client. Moreover, we present an evaluation of the performance and show that GUI-VP is able to run a Linux port of a classic first-person 3D game with reasonable speed. A paper on GUI-VP Kit was accepted at the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2023.