Installing Freedom E SDK

Supported Systems

Freedom E SDK is supported on Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

Linux support is officially provided to distributions we distribute builds of the RISC-V toolchain for. Currently, these distributions are

• Ubuntu

• CentOS

We expect other Linux distributions to work as well, provided that the user can either run our provided toolchains on them or produce their own toolchain.

Windows support is not directly provided by Freedom E SDK, but through our Integrated Development Environment, Freedom Studio.

Prerequisites

To use this SDK, you will need the following software available on your machine:

• GNU Make

• Git

• The RISC-V GNU Embedded Toolchain

• RISC-V OpenOCD (for use with development board and FPGA targets)

• Python >= 3.5

• Python Virtualenv

• Python Pip

Install the RISC-V Toolchain and OpenOCD

The RISC-V GNU Toolchain and OpenOCD are available from the SiFive Website.

For OpenOCD and/or RISC-V GNU Toolchain, download the .tar.gz for your platform, and unpack it to your desired location. Then, set the RISCV_PATH and RISCV_OPENOCD_PATH environment variables when using the tools:

cp openocd-<date>-<platform>.tar.gz /my/desired/location/
cp riscv64-unknown-elf-gcc-<date>-<platform>.tar.gz /my/desired/location
cd /my/desired/location
tar -xvf openocd-<date>-<platform>.tar.gz
tar -xvf riscv64-unknown-elf-gcc-<date>-<platform>.tar.gz
export RISCV_OPENOCD_PATH=/my/desired/location/openocd
export RISCV_PATH=/my/desired/location/riscv64-unknown-elf-gcc-<date>-<version>

Install RISC-V QEMU 4.1.0

The RISC-V QEMU Emulator is available from the SiFive Website.

Download the .tar.gz for your platform and unpack it to your desired location. Then, add QEMU to your PATH:

cp riscv-qemu-<version>-<date>-<platform>.tar.gz /my/desired/location
tar -xvf riscv-qemu-<version>-<date>-<platform>.tar.gz
export PATH=$PATH:/my/desired/location/riscv-qemu-<version>-<date>-<platform>/bin

Install Segger J-Link Software

Some targets supported by Freedom E SDK (like the SiFive HiFive1 Rev B) use Segger J-Link OB for programming and debugging. If you intend to use these targets, install the Segger J-Link Software and Documentation Pack for your machine:

Segger J-Link Software Downloads

Cloning the Repository

This repository can be cloned by running the following commands:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/sifive/freedom-e-sdk.git
cd freedom-e-sdk

The --recursive option is required to clone the git submodules included in the repository. If at first you omit the --recursive option, you can achieve the same effect by updating submodules using the command:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Updating the SDK

If you’d like to update your SDK to the latest version:

git pull origin master
git submodule update --init --recursive