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 paper, 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 well-known X-applications can be executed in GUI-VP using a VNC network connection. Moreover, we demonstrate reasonable speed for a Linux port of a classic first-person 3D-game.