A RISC-V hardware platform can contain one or more RISC-V-compatible processing cores together with other non-RISC-V-compatible cores, fixed-function accelerators, various physical memory structures, I/O devices, and an interconnect structure to allow the components to communicate.

A component is termed a core if it contains an independent instruction fetch unit. A RISC-V-compatible core might support multiple RISC-V-compatible hardware threads, or harts, through multithreading.

A RISC-V core might have additional specialized instruction-set extensions or an added coprocessor. We use the term coprocessor to refer to a unit that is attached to a RISC-V core and is mostly sequenced by a RISC-V instruction stream, but which contains additional architectural state and instruction-set extensions, and possibly some limited autonomy relative to the primary RISC-V instruction stream.

We use the term accelerator to refer to either a non-programmable fixed-function unit or a core that can operate autonomously but is specialized for certain tasks. In RISC-V systems, we expect many programmable accelerators will be RISC-V-based cores with specialized instruction-set extensions and/or customized coprocessors. An important class of RISC-V accelerators are I/O accelerators, which offload I/O processing tasks from the main application cores.

The system-level organization of a RISC-V hardware platform can range from a single-core microcontroller to a many-thousand-node cluster of shared-memory manycore server nodes. Even small systems-on-a-chip might be structured as a hierarchy of multicomputers and/or multiprocessors to modularize development effort or to provide secure isolation between subsystems.

The behavior of a RISC-V program depends on the execution environment in which it runs. A RISC-V execution environment interface (EEI) defines the initial state of the program, the number and type of harts in the environment including the privilege modes supported by the harts, the accessibility and attributes of memory and I/O regions, the behavior of all legal instructions executed on each hart (i.e., the ISA is one component of the EEI), and the handling of any interrupts or exceptions raised during execution including environment calls. Examples of EEIs include the Linux application binary interface (ABI), or the RISC-V supervisor binary interface (SBI). The implementation of a RISC-V execution environment can be pure hardware, pure software, or a combination of hardware and software. For example, opcode traps and software emulation can be used to implement functionality not provided in hardware. Examples of execution environment implementations include:

From the perspective of software running in a given execution environment, a hart is a resource that autonomously fetches and executes RISC-V instructions within that execution environment. In this respect, a hart behaves like a hardware thread resource even if time-multiplexed onto real hardware by the execution environment. Some EEIs support the creation and destruction of additional harts, for example, via environment calls to fork new harts.

The execution environment is responsible for ensuring the eventual forward progress of each of its harts. For a given hart, that responsibility is suspended while the hart is exercising a mechanism that explicitly waits for an event, such as the wait-for-interrupt instruction defined in Volume II of this specification; and that responsibility ends if the hart is terminated. The following events constitute forward progress:

A RISC-V ISA is defined as a base integer ISA, which must be present in any implementation, plus optional extensions to the base ISA. The base integer ISAs are very similar to that of the early RISC processors except with no branch delay slots and with support for optional variable-length instruction encodings. A base is carefully restricted to a minimal set of instructions sufficient to provide a reasonable target for compilers, assemblers, linkers, and operating systems (with additional privileged operations), and so provides a convenient ISA and software toolchain "skeleton" around which more customized processor ISAs can be built.

Although it is convenient to speak of the RISC-V ISA, RISC-V is actually a family of related ISAs, of which there are currently four base ISAs. Each base integer instruction set is characterized by the width of the integer registers and the corresponding size of the address space and by the number of integer registers. There are two primary base integer variants, RV32I and RV64I, described in [rv32] and [rv64], which provide 32-bit or 64-bit address spaces respectively. We use the term XLEN to refer to the width of an integer register in bits (either 32 or 64). Chapter 6 describes the RV32E and RV64E subset variants of the RV32I or RV64I base instruction sets respectively, which have been added to support small microcontrollers, and which have half the number of integer registers. Chapter 8 sketches a future RV128I variant of the base integer instruction set supporting a flat 128-bit address space (XLEN=128). The base integer instruction sets use a two’s-complement representation for signed integer values.

RISC-V has been designed to support extensive customization and specialization. Each base integer ISA can be extended with one or more optional instruction-set extensions. An extension may be categorized as either standard, custom, or non-conforming. For this purpose, we divide each RISC-V instruction-set encoding space (and related encoding spaces such as the CSRs) into three disjoint categories: standard, reserved, and custom. Standard extensions and encodings are defined by RISC-V International; any extensions not defined by RISC-V International are non-standard. Each base ISA and its standard extensions use only standard encodings, and shall not conflict with each other in their uses of these encodings. Reserved encodings are currently not defined but are saved for future standard extensions; once thus used, they become standard encodings. Custom encodings shall never be used for standard extensions and are made available for vendor-specific non-standard extensions. Non-standard extensions are either custom extensions, that use only custom encodings, or non-conforming extensions, that use any standard or reserved encoding. Instruction-set extensions are generally shared but may provide slightly different functionality depending on the base ISA. [extending] describes various ways of extending the RISC-V ISA. We have also developed a naming convention for RISC-V base instructions and instruction-set extensions, described in detail in [naming].

To support more general software development, a set of standard extensions are defined to provide integer multiply/divide, atomic operations, and single and double-precision floating-point arithmetic. The base integer ISA is named "I" (prefixed by RV32 or RV64 depending on integer register width), and contains integer computational instructions, integer loads, integer stores, and control-flow instructions. The standard integer multiplication and division extension is named "M", and adds instructions to multiply and divide values held in the integer registers. The standard atomic instruction extension, denoted by "A", adds instructions that atomically read, modify, and write memory for inter-processor synchronization. The standard single-precision floating-point extension, denoted by "F", adds floating-point registers, single-precision computational instructions, and single-precision loads and stores. The standard double-precision floating-point extension, denoted by "D", expands the floating-point registers, and adds double-precision computational instructions, loads, and stores. The standard "C" compressed instruction extension provides narrower 16-bit forms of common instructions.

Beyond the base integer ISA and these standard extensions, we believe it is rare that a new instruction will provide a significant benefit for all applications, although it may be very beneficial for a certain domain. As energy efficiency concerns are forcing greater specialization, we believe it is important to simplify the required portion of an ISA specification. Whereas other architectures usually treat their ISA as a single entity, which changes to a new version as instructions are added over time, RISC-V will endeavor to keep the base and each standard extension constant over time, and instead layer new instructions as further optional extensions. For example, the base integer ISAs will continue as fully supported standalone ISAs, regardless of any subsequent extensions.

A RISC-V hart has a single byte-addressable address space of \(2^{\text{XLEN}}\) bytes for all memory accesses. A word of memory is defined as 32 bits (4 bytes). Correspondingly, a halfword is 16 bits (2 bytes), a doubleword is 64 bits (8 bytes), and a quadword is 128 bits (16 bytes). The memory address space is circular, so that the byte at address \(2^{\text{XLEN}}-1\) is adjacent to the byte at address zero. Accordingly, memory address computations done by the hardware ignore overflow and instead wrap around modulo \(2^{\text{XLEN}}\).

The execution environment determines the mapping of hardware resources into a hart’s address space. Different address ranges of a hart’s address space may (1) be vacant, or (2) contain main memory, or (3) contain one or more I/O devices. Reads and writes of I/O devices may have visible side effects, but accesses to main memory cannot. Although it is possible for the execution environment to call everything in a hart’s address space an I/O device, it is usually expected that some portion will be specified as main memory.

When a RISC-V platform has multiple harts, the address spaces of any two harts may be entirely the same, or entirely different, or may be partly different but sharing some subset of resources, mapped into the same or different address ranges.

Executing each RISC-V machine instruction entails one or more memory accesses, subdivided into implicit and explicit accesses. For each instruction executed, an implicit memory read (instruction fetch) is done to obtain the encoded instruction to execute. Many RISC-V instructions perform no further memory accesses beyond instruction fetch. Specific load and store instructions perform an explicit read or write of memory at an address determined by the instruction. The execution environment may dictate that instruction execution performs other implicit memory accesses (such as to implement address translation) beyond those documented for the unprivileged ISA.

The execution environment determines what portions of the non-vacant address space are accessible for each kind of memory access. For example, the set of locations that can be implicitly read for instruction fetch may or may not have any overlap with the set of locations that can be explicitly read by a load instruction; and the set of locations that can be explicitly written by a store instruction may be only a subset of locations that can be read. Ordinarily, if an instruction attempts to access memory at an inaccessible address, an exception is raised for the instruction. Vacant locations in the address space are never accessible.

Except when specified otherwise, implicit reads that do not raise an exception and that have no side effects may occur arbitrarily early and speculatively, even before the machine could possibly prove that the read will be needed. For instance, a valid implementation could attempt to read all of main memory at the earliest opportunity, cache as many fetchable (executable) bytes as possible for later instruction fetches, and avoid reading main memory for instruction fetches ever again. To ensure that certain implicit reads are ordered only after writes to the same memory locations, software must execute specific fence or cache-control instructions defined for this purpose (such as the FENCE.I instruction defined in [zifencei]).

The memory accesses (implicit or explicit) made by a hart may appear to occur in a different order as perceived by another hart or by any other agent that can access the same memory. This perceived reordering of memory accesses is always constrained, however, by the applicable memory consistency model. The default memory consistency model for RISC-V is the RISC-V Weak Memory Ordering (RVWMO), defined in [memorymodel] and in appendices. Optionally, an implementation may adopt the stronger model of Total Store Ordering, as defined in [ztso]. The execution environment may also add constraints that further limit the perceived reordering of memory accesses. Since the RVWMO model is the weakest model allowed for any RISC-V implementation, software written for this model is compatible with the actual memory consistency rules of all RISC-V implementations. As with implicit reads, software must execute fence or cache-control instructions to ensure specific ordering of memory accesses beyond the requirements of the assumed memory consistency model and execution environment.

The base RISC-V ISA has fixed-length 32-bit instructions that must be naturally aligned on 32-bit boundaries. However, the standard RISC-V encoding scheme is designed to support ISA extensions with variable-length instructions, where each instruction can be any number of 16-bit instruction parcels in length and parcels are naturally aligned on 16-bit boundaries. The standard compressed ISA extension described in [compressed] reduces code size by providing compressed 16-bit instructions and relaxes the alignment constraints to allow all instructions (16 bit and 32 bit) to be aligned on any 16-bit boundary to improve code density.

We use the term IALIGN (measured in bits) to refer to the instruction-address alignment constraint the implementation enforces. IALIGN is 32 bits in the base ISA, but some ISA extensions, including the compressed ISA extension, relax IALIGN to 16 bits. IALIGN may not take on any value other than 16 or 32.

We use the term ILEN (measured in bits) to refer to the maximum instruction length supported by an implementation, and which is always a multiple of IALIGN. For implementations supporting only a base instruction set, ILEN is 32 bits. Implementations supporting longer instructions have larger values of ILEN.

Table 1 illustrates the standard RISC-V instruction-length encoding convention. All the 32-bit instructions in the base ISA have their lowest two bits set to "11". The optional compressed 16-bit instruction-set extensions have their lowest two bits equal to 00, 01, or 10.

We use the term exception to refer to an unusual condition occurring at run time associated with an instruction in the current RISC-V hart. We use the term interrupt to refer to an external asynchronous event that may cause a RISC-V hart to experience an unexpected transfer of control. We use the term trap to refer to the transfer of control to a trap handler caused by either an exception or an interrupt.

The instruction descriptions in following chapters describe conditions that can raise an exception during execution. The general behavior of most RISC-V EEIs is that a trap to some handler occurs when an exception is signaled on an instruction (except for floating-point exceptions, which, in the standard floating-point extensions, do not cause traps). The manner in which interrupts are generated, routed to, and enabled by a hart depends on the EEI.

How traps are handled and made visible to software running on the hart depends on the enclosing execution environment. From the perspective of software running inside an execution environment, traps encountered by a hart at runtime can have four different effects:

Table 2 shows the characteristics of each kind of trap.

Table 2 Characteristics of traps: 1) Termination may be requested. 2) Imprecise fatal traps might be observable by software.

The EEI defines for each trap whether it is handled precisely, though the recommendation is to maintain preciseness where possible. Contained and requested traps can be observed to be imprecise by software inside the execution environment. Invisible traps, by definition, cannot be observed to be precise or imprecise by software running inside the execution environment. Fatal traps can be observed to be imprecise by software running inside the execution environment, if known-errorful instructions do not cause immediate termination.

Because this document describes unprivileged instructions, traps are rarely mentioned. Architectural means to handle contained traps are defined in the privileged architecture manual, along with other features to support richer EEIs. Unprivileged instructions that are defined solely to cause requested traps are documented here. Invisible traps are, by their nature, out of scope for this document. Instruction encodings that are not defined here and not defined by some other means may cause a fatal trap.

The architecture fully describes what implementations must do and any constraints on what they may do. In cases where the architecture intentionally does not constrain implementations, the term UNSPECIFIED is explicitly used.

The term UNSPECIFIED refers to a behavior or value that is intentionally unconstrained. The definition of these behaviors or values is open to extensions, platform standards, or implementations. Extensions, platform standards, or implementation documentation may provide normative content to further constrain cases that the base architecture defines as UNSPECIFIED.

Like the base architecture, extensions should fully describe allowable behavior and values and use the term UNSPECIFIED for cases that are intentionally unconstrained. These cases may be constrained or defined by other extensions, platform standards, or implementations.