The RISC-V Instruction Set Manual Volume I: Unprivileged Architecture

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 Chapter 2 and Chapter 4, 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. Chapter 35 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 Chapter 36.

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 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 is adjacent to the byte at address zero. Accordingly, memory address computations done by the hardware ignore overflow and instead wrap around modulo .

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 Chapter 6).

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 Chapter 17 and in appendices. Optionally, an implementation may adopt the stronger model of Total Store Ordering, as defined in Chapter 18. 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 Chapter 26 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.

Table 2 shows the unprivileged state for the base integer ISA. For RV32I, the 32 x registers are each 32 bits wide, i.e., XLEN=32. Register x0 is hardwired with all bits equal to 0. General purpose registers x1-x31 hold values that various instructions interpret as a collection of Boolean values, or as two’s complement signed binary integers or unsigned binary integers.

There is one additional unprivileged register: the program counter pc holds the address of the current instruction.

In the base RV32I ISA, there are four core instruction formats (R/I/S/U), as shown in Base instruction formats. All are a fixed 32 bits in length. The base ISA has IALIGN=32, meaning that instructions must be aligned on a four-byte boundary in memory. An instruction-address-misaligned exception is generated on a taken branch or unconditional jump if the target address is not IALIGN-bit aligned. This exception is reported on the branch or jump instruction, not on the target instruction. No instruction-address-misaligned exception is generated for a conditional branch that is not taken.

The behavior upon decoding a reserved instruction is UNSPECIFIED.

The RISC-V ISA keeps the source (rs1 and rs2) and destination (rd) registers at the same position in all formats to simplify decoding. Except for the 5-bit immediates used in CSR instructions (Chapter 7), immediates are always sign-extended, and are generally packed towards the leftmost available bits in the instruction and have been allocated to reduce hardware complexity. In particular, the sign bit for all immediates is always in bit 31 of the instruction to speed sign-extension circuitry.

RISC-V base instruction formats. Each immediate subfield is labeled with the bit position (imm[x]) in the immediate value being produced, rather than the bit position within the instruction’s immediate field as is usually done.

There are a further two variants of the instruction formats (B/J) based on the handling of immediates, as shown in Base instruction formats immediate variants..

The only difference between the S and B formats is that the 12-bit immediate field is used to encode branch offsets in multiples of 2 in the B format. Instead of shifting all bits in the instruction-encoded immediate left by one in hardware as is conventionally done, the middle bits (imm[10:1]) and sign bit stay in fixed positions, while the lowest bit in S format (inst[7]) encodes a high-order bit in B format.

Similarly, the only difference between the U and J formats is that the 20-bit immediate is shifted left by 12 bits to form U immediates and by 1 bit to form J immediates. The location of instruction bits in the U and J format immediates is chosen to maximize overlap with the other formats and with each other.

Immediate types shows the immediates produced by each of the base instruction formats, and is labeled to show which instruction bit (inst[y]) produces each bit of the immediate value.

The fields are labeled with the instruction bits used to construct their value. Sign extensions always uses inst[31].

Most integer computational instructions operate on XLEN bits of values held in the integer register file. Integer computational instructions are either encoded as register-immediate operations using the I-type format or as register-register operations using the R-type format. The destination is register rd for both register-immediate and register-register instructions. No integer computational instructions cause arithmetic exceptions.

RV32I provides two types of control transfer instructions: unconditional jumps and conditional branches. Control transfer instructions in RV32I do not have architecturally visible delay slots.

If an instruction access-fault or instruction page-fault exception occurs on the target of a jump or taken branch, the exception is reported on the target instruction, not on the jump or branch instruction.

RV32I is a load-store architecture, where only load and store instructions access memory and arithmetic instructions only operate on CPU registers. RV32I provides a 32-bit address space that is byte-addressed. The EEI will define what portions of the address space are legal to access with which instructions (e.g., some addresses might be read only, or support word access only). Loads with a destination of x0 must still raise any exceptions and cause any other side effects even though the load value is discarded.

The EEI will define whether the memory system is little-endian or big-endian. In RISC-V, endianness is byte-address invariant.

Load and store instructions transfer a value between the registers and memory. Loads are encoded in the I-type format and stores are S-type. The effective address is obtained by adding register rs1 to the sign-extended 12-bit offset. Loads copy a value from memory to register rd. Stores copy the value in register rs2 to memory.

The LW instruction loads a 32-bit value from memory into rd. LH loads a 16-bit value from memory, then sign-extends to 32-bits before storing in rd. LHU loads a 16-bit value from memory but then zero extends to 32-bits before storing in rd. LB and LBU are defined analogously for 8-bit values. The SW, SH, and SB instructions store 32-bit, 16-bit, and 8-bit values from the low bits of register rs2 to memory.

Regardless of EEI, loads and stores whose effective addresses are naturally aligned shall not raise an address-misaligned exception. Loads and stores whose effective address is not naturally aligned to the referenced datatype (i.e., the effective address is not divisible by the size of the access in bytes) have behavior dependent on the EEI.

An EEI may guarantee that misaligned loads and stores are fully supported, and so the software running inside the execution environment will never experience a contained or fatal address-misaligned trap. In this case, the misaligned loads and stores can be handled in hardware, or via an invisible trap into the execution environment implementation, or possibly a combination of hardware and invisible trap depending on address.

An EEI may not guarantee misaligned loads and stores are handled invisibly. In this case, loads and stores that are not naturally aligned may either complete execution successfully or raise an exception. The exception raised can be either an address-misaligned exception or an access-fault exception. For a memory access that would otherwise be able to complete except for the misalignment, an access-fault exception can be raised instead of an address-misaligned exception if the misaligned access should not be emulated, e.g., if accesses to the memory region have side effects. When an EEI does not guarantee misaligned loads and stores are handled invisibly, the EEI must define if exceptions caused by address misalignment result in a contained trap (allowing software running inside the execution environment to handle the trap) or a fatal trap (terminating execution).

Even when misaligned loads and stores complete successfully, these accesses might run extremely slowly depending on the implementation (e.g., when implemented via an invisible trap). Furthermore, whereas naturally aligned loads and stores are guaranteed to execute atomically, misaligned loads and stores might not, and hence require additional synchronization to ensure atomicity.

The FENCE instruction is used to order device I/O and memory accesses as viewed by other RISC-V harts and external devices or coprocessors. Any combination of device input (I), device output (O), memory reads (R), and memory writes (W) may be ordered with respect to any combination of the same. Informally, no other RISC-V hart or external device can observe any operation in the successor set following a FENCE before any operation in the predecessor set preceding the FENCE. Chapter 17 provides a precise description of the RISC-V memory consistency model.

The FENCE instruction also orders memory reads and writes made by the hart as observed by memory reads and writes made by an external device. However, FENCE does not order observations of events made by an external device using any other signaling mechanism.

The EEI will define what I/O operations are possible, and in particular, which memory addresses when accessed by load and store instructions will be treated and ordered as device input and device output operations respectively rather than memory reads and writes. For example, memory-mapped I/O devices will typically be accessed with uncached loads and stores that are ordered using the I and O bits rather than the R and W bits. Instruction-set extensions might also describe new I/O instructions that will also be ordered using the I and O bits in a FENCE.

The fence mode field fm defines the semantics of the FENCE. A FENCE with fm=0000 orders all memory operations in its predecessor set before all memory operations in its successor set.

The FENCE.TSO instruction is encoded as a FENCE instruction with fm=1000, predecessor=RW, and successor=RW. FENCE.TSO orders all load operations in its predecessor set before all memory operations in its successor set, and all store operations in its predecessor set before all store operations in its successor set. This leaves non-AMO store operations in the FENCE.TSO’s predecessor set unordered with non-AMO loads in its successor set.

The unused fields in the FENCE instructions--rs1 and rd--are reserved for finer-grain fences in future extensions. For forward compatibility, base implementations shall ignore these fields, and standard software shall zero these fields. Likewise, many fm and predecessor/successor set settings in Table 4 are also reserved for future use. Base implementations shall treat all such reserved configurations as normal fences with fm=0000, and standard software shall use only non-reserved configurations.

SYSTEM instructions are used to access system functionality that might require privileged access and are encoded using the I-type instruction format. These can be divided into two main classes: those that atomically read-modify-write control and status registers (CSRs), and all other potentially privileged instructions. CSR instructions are described in Chapter 7, and the base unprivileged instructions are described in the following section.

These two instructions cause a precise requested trap to the supporting execution environment.

The ECALL instruction is used to make a service request to the execution environment. The EEI will define how parameters for the service request are passed, but usually these will be in defined locations in the integer register file.

The EBREAK instruction is used to return control to a debugging environment.

RV32I reserves a large encoding space for HINT instructions, which are usually used to communicate performance hints to the microarchitecture. Like the NOP instruction, HINTs do not change any architecturally visible state, except for advancing the pc and any applicable performance counters. Implementations are always allowed to ignore the encoded hints.

Most RV32I HINTs are encoded as integer computational instructions with rd=x0. The other RV32I HINTs are encoded as FENCE instructions with a null predecessor or successor set and with fm=0.

Table 5 lists all RV32I HINT code points. 91% of the HINT space is reserved for standard HINTs. The remainder of the HINT space is designated for custom HINTs: no standard HINTs will ever be defined in this subspace.

RV32E and RV64E reduce the integer register count to 16 general-purpose registers, (x0-x15), where x0 is a dedicated zero register.

RV32E and RV64E use the same instruction-set encoding as RV32I and RV64I respectively, except that only registers x0-x15 are provided. All encodings specifying the other registers x16-x31 are reserved.

RV64I widens the integer registers and supported user address space to 64 bits (XLEN=64 in Table 2).

Most integer computational instructions operate on XLEN-bit values. Additional instruction variants are provided to manipulate 32-bit values in RV64I, indicated by a 'W' suffix to the opcode. These "*W" instructions ignore the upper 32 bits of their inputs and always produce 32-bit signed values, sign-extending them to 64 bits, i.e. bits XLEN-1 through 31 are equal.

RV64I extends the address space to 64 bits. The execution environment will define what portions of the address space are legal to access.

The LD instruction loads a 64-bit value from memory into register rd for RV64I.

The LW instruction loads a 32-bit value from memory and sign-extends this to 64 bits before storing it in register rd for RV64I. The LWU instruction, on the other hand, zero-extends the 32-bit value from memory for RV64I. LH and LHU are defined analogously for 16-bit values, as are LB and LBU for 8-bit values. The SD, SW, SH, and SB instructions store 64-bit, 32-bit, 16-bit, and 8-bit values from the low bits of register rs2 to memory respectively.

All instructions that are microarchitectural HINTs in RV32I (see Chapter 2) are also HINTs in RV64I. The additional computational instructions in RV64I expand both the standard and custom HINT encoding spaces.

Table 6 lists all RV64I HINT code points. 91% of the HINT space is reserved for standard HINTs, but none are presently defined. The remainder of the HINT space is designated for custom HINTs; no standard HINTs will ever be defined in this subspace.

All CSR instructions atomically read-modify-write a single CSR, whose CSR specifier is encoded in the 12-bit csr field of the instruction held in bits 31-20. The immediate forms use a 5-bit zero-extended immediate encoded in the rs1 field.

The CSRRW (Atomic Read/Write CSR) instruction atomically swaps values in the CSRs and integer registers. CSRRW reads the old value of the CSR, zero-extends the value to XLEN bits, then writes it to integer register rd. The initial value in rs1 is written to the CSR. If rd=x0, then the instruction shall not read the CSR and shall not cause any of the side effects that might occur on a CSR read.

The CSRRS (Atomic Read and Set Bits in CSR) instruction reads the value of the CSR, zero-extends the value to XLEN bits, and writes it to integer register rd. The initial value in integer register rs1 is treated as a bit mask that specifies bit positions to be set in the CSR. Any bit that is high in rs1 will cause the corresponding bit to be set in the CSR, if that CSR bit is writable.

The CSRRC (Atomic Read and Clear Bits in CSR) instruction reads the value of the CSR, zero-extends the value to XLEN bits, and writes it to integer register rd. The initial value in integer register rs1 is treated as a bit mask that specifies bit positions to be cleared in the CSR. Any bit that is high in rs1 will cause the corresponding bit to be cleared in the CSR, if that CSR bit is writable.

For both CSRRS and CSRRC, if rs1=x0, then the instruction will not write to the CSR at all, and so shall not cause any of the side effects that might otherwise occur on a CSR write, nor raise illegal-instruction exceptions on accesses to read-only CSRs. Both CSRRS and CSRRC always read the addressed CSR and cause any read side effects regardless of rs1 and rd fields. Note that if rs1 specifies a register other than x0, and that register holds a zero value, the instruction will not action any attendant per-field side effects, but will action any side effects caused by writing to the entire CSR.

A CSRRW with rs1=x0 will attempt to write zero to the destination CSR.

The CSRRWI, CSRRSI, and CSRRCI variants are similar to CSRRW, CSRRS, and CSRRC respectively, except they update the CSR using an XLEN-bit value obtained by zero-extending a 5-bit unsigned immediate (uimm[4:0]) field encoded in the rs1 field instead of a value from an integer register. For CSRRSI and CSRRCI, if the uimm[4:0] field is zero, then these instructions will not write to the CSR, and shall not cause any of the side effects that might otherwise occur on a CSR write, nor raise illegal-instruction exceptions on accesses to read-only CSRs. For CSRRWI, if rd=x0, then the instruction shall not read the CSR and shall not cause any of the side effects that might occur on a CSR read. Both CSRRSI and CSRRCI will always read the CSR and cause any read side effects regardless of rd and rs1 fields.

Table 7 summarizes the behavior of the CSR instructions with respect to whether they read and/or write the CSR.

In addition to side effects that occur as a consequence of reading or writing a CSR, individual fields within a CSR might have side effects when written. The CSRRW[I] instructions action side effects for all such fields within the written CSR. The CSRRS[I] an CSRRC[I] instructions only action side effects for fields for which the rs1 or uimm argument has at least one bit set corresponding to that field.

For any event or consequence that occurs due to a CSR having a particular value, if a write to the CSR gives it that value, the resulting event or consequence is said to be an indirect effect of the write. Indirect effects of a CSR write are not considered by the RISC-V ISA to be side effects of that write.

Some CSRs, such as the instructions-retired counter, instret, may be modified as side effects of instruction execution. In these cases, if a CSR access instruction reads a CSR, it reads the value prior to the execution of the instruction. If a CSR access instruction writes such a CSR, the write is done instead of the increment. In particular, a value written to instret by one instruction will be the value read by the following instruction.

The assembler pseudoinstruction to read a CSR, CSRR rd, csr, is encoded as CSRRS rd, csr, x0. The assembler pseudoinstruction to write a CSR, CSRW csr, rs1, is encoded as CSRRW x0, csr, rs1, while CSRWI csr, uimm, is encoded as CSRRWI x0, csr, uimm.

Further assembler pseudoinstructions are defined to set and clear bits in the CSR when the old value is not required: CSRS/CSRC csr, rs1; CSRSI/CSRCI csr, uimm.

The Zicntr standard extension comprises the first three of these counters (CYCLE, TIME, and INSTRET), which have dedicated functions (cycle count, real-time clock, and instructions retired, respectively). The Zicntr extension depends on the Zicsr extension.

For base ISAs with XLEN≥64, CSR instructions can access the full 64-bit CSRs directly. In particular, the RDCYCLE, RDTIME, and RDINSTRET pseudoinstructions read the full 64 bits of the cycle, time, and instret counters.

For base ISAs with XLEN=32, the Zicntr extension enables the three 64-bit read-only counters to be accessed in 32-bit pieces. The RDCYCLE, RDTIME, and RDINSTRET pseudoinstructions provide the lower 32 bits, and the RDCYCLEH, RDTIMEH, and RDINSTRETH pseudoinstructions provide the upper 32 bits of the respective counters.

The RDCYCLE pseudoinstruction reads the low XLEN bits of the cycle CSR which holds a count of the number of clock cycles executed by the processor core on which the hart is running from an arbitrary start time in the past. RDCYCLEH is only present when XLEN=32 and reads bits 63-32 of the same cycle counter. The underlying 64-bit counter should never overflow in practice. The rate at which the cycle counter advances will depend on the implementation and operating environment. The execution environment should provide a means to determine the current rate (cycles/second) at which the cycle counter is incrementing.

The RDTIME pseudoinstruction reads the low XLEN bits of the "time" CSR, which counts wall-clock real time that has passed from an arbitrary start time in the past. RDTIMEH is only present when XLEN=32 and reads bits 63-32 of the same real-time counter. The underlying 64-bit counter increments by one with each tick of the real-time clock, and, for realistic real-time clock frequencies, should never overflow in practice. The execution environment should provide a means of determining the period of a counter tick (seconds/tick). The period should be constant within a small error bound. The environment should provide a means to determine the accuracy of the clock (i.e., the maximum relative error between the nominal and actual real-time clock periods).

The real-time clocks of all harts must be synchronized to within one tick of the real-time clock.

The RDINSTRET pseudoinstruction reads the low XLEN bits of the instret CSR, which counts the number of instructions retired by this hart from some arbitrary start point in the past. RDINSTRETH is only present when XLEN=32 and reads bits 63-32 of the same instruction counter. The underlying 64-bit counter should never overflow in practice.

The following code sequence will read a valid 64-bit cycle counter value into x3:x2, even if the counter overflows its lower half between reading its upper and lower halves.

The Zihpm extension comprises up to 29 additional unprivileged 64-bit hardware performance counters, hpmcounter3-hpmcounter31. When XLEN=32, the upper 32 bits of these performance counters are accessible via additional CSRs hpmcounter3h- hpmcounter31h. The Zihpm extension depends on the Zicsr extension.

The implemented number and width of these additional counters, and the set of events they count, is platform-specific. Accessing an unimplemented or ill-configured counter may cause an illegal-instruction exception or may return a constant value.

The execution environment should provide a means to determine the number and width of the implemented counters, and an interface to configure the events to be counted by each counter.

This section defines the "Zcmop" extension, which defines eight 16-bit MOP instructions named C.MOP.n, where n is an odd integer between 1 and 15, inclusive. C.MOP.n is encoded in the reserved encoding space corresponding to C.LUI xn, 0, as shown in Table 10. Unlike the MOPs defined in the Zimop extension, the C.MOP.n instructions are defined to not write any register. Their encoding allows future extensions to define them to read register x[n].

The Zcmop extension requires the Zca extension.

The Zicond extension defines a simple solution that provides most of the benefit and all of the flexibility one would desire to support conditional arithmetic and conditional-select/move operations, while remaining true to the RISC-V design philosophy. The instructions follow the format for R-type instructions with 3 operands (i.e., 2 source operands and 1 destination operand). Using these instructions, branchless sequences can be implemented (typically in two-instruction sequences) without the need for instruction fusion, special provisions during the decoding of architectural instructions, or other microarchitectural provisions.

One of the shortcomings of RISC-V, compared to competing instruction set architectures, is the absence of conditional operations to support branchless code-generation: this includes conditional arithmetic, conditional select and conditional move operations. The design principles of RISC-V (e.g. the absence of an instruction-format that supports 3 source registers and an output register) make it unlikely that direct equivalents of the competing instructions will be introduced.

Yet, low-cost conditional instructions are a desirable feature as they allow the replacement of branches in a broad range of suitable situations (whether the branch turns out to be unpredictable or predictable) so as to reduce the capacity and aliasing pressures on BTBs and branch predictors, and to allow for longer basic blocks (for both the hardware and the compiler to work with).

The "Conditional" operations extension provides a simple solution that provides most of the benefit and all of the flexibility one would desire to support conditional arithmetic and conditional-select/move operations, while remaining true to the RISC-V design philosophy. The instructions follow the format for R-type instructions with 3 operands (i.e., 2 source operands and 1 destination operand). Using these instructions, branchless sequences can be implemented (typically in two-instruction sequences) without the need for instruction fusion, special provisions during the decoding of architectural instructions, or other microarchitectural provisions.

The following instructions comprise the Zicond extension:

Based on these two instructions, synthetic instructions (i.e., short instruction sequences) for the following conditional arithmetic operations are supported:

Additionally, the following conditional select instructions are supported:

More complex conditions, such as comparisons against immediates, registers, single-bit tests, comparisons against ranges, etc. can be realized by composing these new instructions with existing instructions.

The instructions from this extension can be used to construct sequences that perform conditional-arithmetic, conditional-bitwise-logical, and conditional-select operations.

MUL performs an XLEN-bit×XLEN-bit multiplication of rs1 by rs2 and places the lower XLEN bits in the destination register. MULH, MULHU, and MULHSU perform the same multiplication but return the upper XLEN bits of the full 2×XLEN-bit product, for signed×signed, unsigned×unsigned, and rs1×unsigned rs2 multiplication, respectively. If both the high and low bits of the same product are required, then the recommended code sequence is: MULH[[S]U] rdh, rs1, rs2; MUL rdl, rs1, rs2 (source register specifiers must be in same order and rdh cannot be the same as rs1 or rs2). Microarchitectures can then fuse these into a single multiply operation instead of performing two separate multiplies.

MULW is an RV64 instruction that multiplies the lower 32 bits of the source registers, placing the sign-extension of the lower 32 bits of the result into the destination register.

DIV and DIVU perform an XLEN bits by XLEN bits signed and unsigned integer division of rs1 by rs2, rounding towards zero. REM and REMU provide the remainder of the corresponding division operation. For REM, the sign of a nonzero result equals the sign of the dividend.

If both the quotient and remainder are required from the same division, the recommended code sequence is: DIV[U] rdq, rs1, rs2; REM[U] rdr, rs1, rs2 (rdq cannot be the same as rs1 or rs2). Microarchitectures can then fuse these into a single divide operation instead of performing two separate divides.

DIVW and DIVUW are RV64 instructions that divide the lower 32 bits of rs1 by the lower 32 bits of rs2, treating them as signed and unsigned integers respectively, placing the 32-bit quotient in rd, sign-extended to 64 bits. REMW and REMUW are RV64 instructions that provide the corresponding signed and unsigned remainder operations respectively. Both REMW and REMUW always sign-extend the 32-bit result to 64 bits, including on a divide by zero.

The semantics for division by zero and division overflow are summarized in Table 11. The quotient of division by zero has all bits set, and the remainder of division by zero equals the dividend. Signed division overflow occurs only when the most-negative integer is divided by . The quotient of a signed division with overflow is equal to the dividend, and the remainder is zero. Unsigned division overflow cannot occur.

The Zmmul extension implements the multiplication subset of the M extension. It adds all of the instructions defined in Section 13.1, namely: MUL, MULH, MULHU, MULHSU, and (for RV64 only) MULW. The encodings are identical to those of the corresponding M-extension instructions. M implies Zmmul.

The base RISC-V ISA has a relaxed memory model, with the FENCE instruction used to impose additional ordering constraints. The address space is divided by the execution environment into memory and I/O domains, and the FENCE instruction provides options to order accesses to one or both of these two address domains.

To provide more efficient support for release consistency (Gharachorloo et al., 1990), each atomic instruction has two bits, aq and rl, used to specify additional memory ordering constraints as viewed by other RISC-V harts. The bits order accesses to one of the two address domains, memory or I/O, depending on which address domain the atomic instruction is accessing. No ordering constraint is implied to accesses to the other domain, and a FENCE instruction should be used to order across both domains.

If both bits are clear, no additional ordering constraints are imposed on the atomic memory operation. If only the aq bit is set, the atomic memory operation is treated as an acquire access, i.e., no following memory operations on this RISC-V hart can be observed to take place before the acquire memory operation. If only the rl bit is set, the atomic memory operation is treated as a release access, i.e., the release memory operation cannot be observed to take place before any earlier memory operations on this RISC-V hart. If both the aq and rl bits are set, the atomic memory operation is sequentially consistent and cannot be observed to happen before any earlier memory operations or after any later memory operations in the same RISC-V hart and to the same address domain.

Complex atomic memory operations on a single memory word or doubleword are performed with the load-reserved (LR) and store-conditional (SC) instructions. LR.W loads a word from the address in rs1, places the sign-extended value in rd, and registers a reservation set—a set of bytes that subsumes the bytes in the addressed word. SC.W conditionally writes a word in rs2 to the address in rs1: the SC.W succeeds only if the reservation is still valid and the reservation set contains the bytes being written. If the SC.W succeeds, the instruction writes the word in rs2 to memory, and it writes zero to rd. If the SC.W fails, the instruction does not write to memory, and it writes a nonzero value to rd. For the purposes of memory protection, a failed SC.W may be treated like a store. Regardless of success or failure, executing an SC.W instruction invalidates any reservation held by this hart. LR.D and SC.D act analogously on doublewords and are only available on RV64. For RV64, LR.W and SC.W sign-extend the value placed in rd.

The failure code with value 1 encodes an unspecified failure. Other failure codes are reserved at this time. Portable software should only assume the failure code will be non-zero.

For LR and SC, the Zalrsc extension requires that the address held in rs1 be naturally aligned to the size of the operand (i.e., eight-byte aligned for doublewords and four-byte aligned for words). If the address is not naturally aligned, an address-misaligned exception or an access-fault exception will be generated. The access-fault exception can be generated for a memory access that would otherwise be able to complete except for the misalignment, if the misaligned access should not be emulated.

An implementation can register an arbitrarily large reservation set on each LR, provided the reservation set includes all bytes of the addressed data word or doubleword. An SC can only pair with the most recent LR in program order. An SC may succeed only if no store from another hart to the reservation set can be observed to have occurred between the LR and the SC, and if there is no other SC between the LR and itself in program order. An SC may succeed only if no write from a device other than a hart to the bytes accessed by the LR instruction can be observed to have occurred between the LR and SC. Note this LR might have had a different effective address and data size, but reserved the SC’s address as part of the reservation set.

The SC must fail if the address is not within the reservation set of the most recent LR in program order. The SC must fail if a store to the reservation set from another hart can be observed to occur between the LR and SC. The SC must fail if a write from some other device to the bytes accessed by the LR can be observed to occur between the LR and SC. (If such a device writes the reservation set but does not write the bytes accessed by the LR, the SC may or may not fail.) An SC must fail if there is another SC (to any address) between the LR and the SC in program order. The precise statement of the atomicity requirements for successful LR/SC sequences is defined by the Atomicity Axiom in Section 17.1.

An SC instruction can never be observed by another RISC-V hart before the LR instruction that established the reservation.

Software should not set the rl bit on an LR instruction unless the aq bit is also set, nor should software set the aq bit on an SC instruction unless the rl bit is also set. LR.rl and SC.aq instructions are not guaranteed to provide any stronger ordering than those with both bits clear, but may result in lower performance.

LR/SC can be used to construct lock-free data structures. An example using LR/SC to implement a compare-and-swap function is shown in Example 2. If inlined, compare-and-swap functionality need only take four instructions.

The Zalrsc extension defines constrained LR/SC loops, which have the following properties:

LR/SC sequences that do not lie within constrained LR/SC loops are unconstrained. Unconstrained LR/SC sequences might succeed on some attempts on some implementations, but might never succeed on other implementations.

If a hart H enters a constrained LR/SC loop, the execution environment must guarantee that one of the following events eventually occurs:

The atomic memory operation (AMO) instructions perform read-modify-write operations for multiprocessor synchronization and are encoded with an R-type instruction format. These AMO instructions atomically load a data value from the address in rs1, place the value into register rd, apply a binary operator to the loaded value and the original value in rs2, then store the result back to the original address in rs1. AMOs can either operate on doublewords (RV64 only) or words in memory. For RV64, 32-bit AMOs always sign-extend the value placed in rd, and ignore the upper 32 bits of the original value of rs2.

For AMOs, the Zaamo extension requires that the address held in rs1 be naturally aligned to the size of the operand (i.e., eight-byte aligned for doublewords and four-byte aligned for words). If the address is not naturally aligned, an address-misaligned exception or an access-fault exception will be generated. The access-fault exception can be generated for a memory access that would otherwise be able to complete except for the misalignment, if the misaligned access should not be emulated.

The misaligned atomicity granule PMA, defined in Volume II of this manual, optionally relaxes this alignment requirement. If present, the misaligned atomicity granule PMA specifies the size of a misaligned atomicity granule, a power-of-two number of bytes. The misaligned atomicity granule PMA applies only to AMOs, loads and stores defined in the base ISAs, and loads and stores of no more than XLEN bits defined in the F, D, and Q extensions. For an instruction in that set, if all accessed bytes lie within the same misaligned atomicity granule, the instruction will not raise an exception for reasons of address alignment, and the instruction will give rise to only one memory operation for the purposes of RVWMO—​i.e., it will execute atomically.

The operations supported are swap, integer add, bitwise AND, bitwise OR, bitwise XOR, and signed and unsigned integer maximum and minimum. Without ordering constraints, these AMOs can be used to implement parallel reduction operations, where typically the return value would be discarded by writing to x0.

To help implement multiprocessor synchronization, the AMOs optionally provide release consistency semantics. If the aq bit is set, then no later memory operations in this RISC-V hart can be observed to take place before the AMO. Conversely, if the rl bit is set, then other RISC-V harts will not observe the AMO before memory accesses preceding the AMO in this RISC-V hart. Setting both the aq and the rl bit on an AMO makes the sequence sequentially consistent, meaning that it cannot be reordered with earlier or later memory operations from the same hart.

An example code sequence for a critical section guarded by a test-and-test-and-set spinlock is shown in Example Example 3. Note the first AMO is marked aq to order the lock acquisition before the critical section, and the second AMO is marked rl to order the critical section before the lock relinquishment.

The WRS.NTO and WRS.STO instructions cause the hart to temporarily stall execution in a low-power state as long as the reservation set is valid and no pending interrupts, even if disabled, are observed. For WRS.STO the stall duration is bounded by an implementation defined short timeout. These instructions are available in all privilege modes. These instructions are not supported in a constrained LR/SC loop.

Hart execution may be stalled while the following conditions are all satisfied:

While stalled, an implementation is permitted to occasionally terminate the stall and complete execution for any reason.

WRS.NTO and WRS.STO instructions follow the rules of the WFI instruction for resuming execution on a pending interrupt.

When the TW (Timeout Wait) bit in mstatus is set and WRS.NTO is executed in any privilege mode other than M mode, and it does not complete within an implementation-specific bounded time limit, the WRS.NTO instruction will cause an illegal instruction exception.

When executing in VS or VU mode, if the VTW bit is set in hstatus, the TW bit in mstatus is clear, and the WRS.NTO does not complete within an implementation-specific bounded time limit, the WRS.NTO instruction will cause a virtual instruction exception.

Compare-and-Swap (CAS) provides an easy and typically faster way to perform thread synchronization operations when supported as a hardware instruction. CAS is typically used by lock-free and wait-free algorithms. This extension proposes CAS instructions to operate on 32-bit, 64-bit, and 128-bit (RV64 only) data values. The CAS instruction supports the C++11 atomic compare and exchange operation.

While compare-and-swap for XLEN wide data may be accomplished using LR/SC, the CAS atomic instructions scale better to highly parallel systems than LR/SC. Many lock-free algorithms, such as a lock-free queue, require manipulation of pointer variables. A simple CAS operation may not be sufficient to guard against what is commonly referred to as the ABA problem in such algorithms that manipulate pointer variables. To avoid the ABA problem, the algorithms associate a reference counter with the pointer variable and perform updates using a quadword compare and swap (of both the pointer and the counter). The double and quadword CAS instructions support implementation of algorithms for ABA problem avoidance.

The Zacas extension depends upon the Zaamo extension (_RISC-V Instruction Set Manual, Volume I: Unprivileged ISA _, n.d.).

For RV32, AMOCAS.W atomically loads a 32-bit data value from address in rs1, compares the loaded value to the 32-bit value held in rd, and if the comparison is bitwise equal, then stores the 32-bit value held in rs2 to the original address in rs1. The value loaded from memory is placed into register rd. The operation performed by AMOCAS.W for RV32 is as follows: