riscv-software-src/riscv-isa-sim

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

3208 stars · 1097 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Spike is the official RISC-V ISA simulator, providing a functional model of one or more RISC-V harts. It implements a broad range of RISC-V base ISAs and extensions, serving as the reference simulator for RISC-V software development.

Use cases

• simulate RISC-V programs on x86 machines
• test RISC-V kernel and OS code before hardware is available
• run RISC-V bare-metal binaries with the proxy kernel
• validate new RISC-V ISA extension implementations
• develop and debug RISC-V toolchains

When to choose

• you need the reference functional simulator for RISC-V ISA development
• you want to test software against the latest RISC-V extensions
• you are developing compilers, kernels, or bootloaders for RISC-V

When to avoid

• you need cycle-accurate or performance modeling rather than functional simulation
• you need fast full-system emulation of a complete Linux environment (consider QEMU)
• you want a graphical or interactive debugging environment out of the box

Facets

application · maturity active

simulation interpreter developer-tools hardware developer-tools operating-systems windows cross-platform cli risc-v isa-simulator emulator spike instruction-set-simulation linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="riscv-software-src/riscv-isa-sim")