Constrained Random Verification for RISC-V: Overview, Evaluation and Discussion

Abstract:
RISC-V is a modern open and free Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that is designed in a very modular way and enables to integrate custom instruction extensions in order to build highly application specific solutions. Extensive verification and validation is crucial to ensure that the design meets all requirements from the specification. Constrained Random Verification (CRV) has been shown to be a very effective technique for this purpose. RISC-V DV is a powerful CRV framework that is tailored for RISC-V and under active development by Google. In this paper we provide an overview, evaluation and discussion of CRV for RISC-V, based on the RISC-V DV framework. In our evaluation we assess the bug hunting capabilities of RISC-V DV by means of mutation samples and we provide additional execution metrics for the framework. Moreover, we add a discussion on the approach and sketch ideas for future research directions in this area to further boost the approach.