This summer, we were fortunate enough to have Katherine Lim join the lowRISC team at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory as an intern. Katherine’s focus was on operating system and software enabled for lowRISC’s tagged memory, building upon our most recent milestone release. As Katherine’s detailed write-up demonstrates, it’s been a very productive summer.
The goal of this internship was to take the lowRISC hardware release, and demonstrate kernel support and software support for the hardware tagged memory primitives. This includes support for context-switch of the tagctrl
register used to configure tag rules, maintaining tags in pages upon copy-on-write, delivering tag exceptions to user space, loading tags from ELF binaries, and more. It culminated in a demonstration that pulls these various pieces of work together, showing how tagged memory can be used to mark valid branch targets. Read the report for full details.
We believe there is a rich design space in hardware support for tagged memory and tag-based software policies. This operating system enablement work is an important part of exploring that space, and in making it easier for other groups to do the same.
If working on problems like this sounds interesting to you, there’s good news – we’re hiring.
Contact us
lowRISC is a not-for-profit company using collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools, through a unique combination of skills, expertise and vision.
We provide a home for multi-partner projects that deliver verified, high quality IP and tools, which provide the solid foundations that are necessary for the rapid development cycles required for next generation silicon products. lowRISC employs an engineering team in Cambridge, UK, working on our own developments, partner projects, and work-for-hire that is aligned with our mission.