[Tutorial] Establish Linux Environment for Chisel and Chipyard Developments

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Why need a tutorial for Establishing Chisel Environment?

I develop the projects in Virtual Ubuntu Linux, and at the beginning, I always met kinds of errors when I establish the development environment for Chisel which is time-costing and annoying, and I destroyed at least three Virtual Machines because of the wrong environments. Then I concluded several right steps to do that. I tried the steps when I gave up VM and created a new Ubuntu with Virtual Box, it worked well without any error.

Pre- Set Up

1. Install Some Dependences

cd ~
sudo apt-get install vim git autoconf automake autotools-dev curl device-tree-compiler libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev libgmp-dev gawk build-essential bison flex texinfo gperf libtool patchutils bc zlib1g-dev iverilog gtkwave verilator yosys scala python-pip

sudo pip install jupyter notebook

2. Sbt

The build tool for Scala.

echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/sbt/debian /" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sbt.list
curl -sL "https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x2EE0EA64E40A89B84B2DF73499E82A75642AC823" | sudo apt-key add
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sbt

2. Mill (optional)

Mill is another Scala build tool, i.e., an alternative choice of Sbt.

Edited on May 15th, 2021.

You can find the newest release version on this document.

sudo sh -c "curl -L https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/mill/releases/download/0.9.7/0.9.7 > /usr/local/bin/mill && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/mill"

Command to generate configurations for Idea support:

mill mill.scalalib.GenIdea/idea

3. Install Java 8 and Set Default Version

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk-headless
#optional
sudo update-alternatives --config java
sudo update-alternatives --config javac

3. Scala Kernel for Jupyter (optional)

If you're new to Chisel, then maybe you can start at Chisel-Bootcamp, the useful and official Chisel tutorial, online or try it locally. and I translated module 3 to Chinese, you can clone it at my repo. And then you need to add a Scala Kernel to your Jupyter.

curl -L -o coursier https://git.io/coursier && chmod +x coursier
SCALA_VERSION=2.12.8 ALMOND_VERSION=0.2.1
./coursier bootstrap -r jitpack -i user -I user:sh.almond:scala-kernel-api_$SCALA_VERSION:$ALMOND_VERSION sh.almond:scala-kernel_$SCALA_VERSION:$ALMOND_VERSION --sources --default=true -o almond
./almond --install

After you have added the Scala kernel, then you can go to this section to see some steps of config Chisel-Bootcamp.

Clone Chisel Environments (after sbt)

1. Chipyard

QEMU Dependence

Two Errors I met when I tried to install the RISC-V tools:

==>  Configuring qemu

ERROR: glib-2.48 gthread-2.0 is required to compile QEMU

ERROR: pixman >= 0.21.8 not present.
       Please install the pixman devel package.

So we need to install the lib before installing the RISC-V tools:

sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libpixman-1-dev

Setup

git clone https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard.git
cd chipyard
./scripts/init-submodules-no-riscv-tools.sh

Installing the RISC-V Tools

The shell needs bash or you have to correct some commands in env.sh

./scripts/build-toolchains.sh
source ./env.sh

2. Firrtl

You don't need to clone it again if you have cloned chipyard. Just go to the directory ~/chipyard/tools/firrtl, and sbt publishLocal.

cd ~
sudo git clone https://github.com/freechipsproject/firrtl.git && cd firrtl
sudo sbt compile
sudo sbt test
sudo sbt assembly
sudo sbt publishLocal

3. Chisel3

You don't need to clone it again if you have cloned chipyard. Just go to the directory ~/chipyard/tools/chisel3, and sbt publishLocal.

cd ~
sudo git clone https://github.com/freechipsproject/chisel3.git && cd chisel3
sudo sbt compile
sudo sbt test
sudo sbt publishLocal

4. Bootcamp (optional)

git clone https://github.com/freechipsproject/chisel-bootcamp.git
cd chisel-bootcamp
mkdir -p ~/.jupyter/custom
cp source/custom.js ~/.jupyter/custom/custom.js