bcg1/nestedvm repository overview

⁠Updated NestedVM toolchain

This repository contains an updated NestedVM⁠ toolchain that is suitable for building modern C/C++ applications to pure Java bytecode. The official NestedVM project hosted at nestedvm.ibex.org⁠ only supports an old version of GCC (3.3.6). Fortunately, Henry Wertz⁠ has made available to use GCC 4.8 and an updated newlib, and this repository includes those patches.

This repo also has some bug fixes by David Ehrmann⁠ to NestedVM's UnixRuntime and the parsing of ELF files generated by GCC 4.8.

Also incorporated in this repo are John Stroy's⁠ updates to the NestedVM runtime.

⁠Installation

The NestedVM toolchain consists mainly of the following components:

• Lightly patched GCC+binutils+newlib toolchain for compiling C/C++ programs to MIPS binaries
• A compiler written in Java that is capable of translating MIPS binaries into both Java source code and Java bytecode (Java bytecode is the recommended target format)
• A runtime support library that comes in 2 flavors, "standard" and "Unix". The standard runtime is a minimal runtime, just enough to support programs that only read and write from streams and memory. The "Unix" runtime on the other hand provides a significant amount of functionality that should allow many posix programs to compile and run.

To build NestedVM, clone this repository and run make dist. This might take a while, but when finished you will have all of the above components available in upstream/install. The toolchain can be used from that location, or the directory can be copied to some other location if you wish. You can use make install to achieve this (will install to /usr/local/nestedvm by default). If you want to install to some location other than the default, specify the prefix environment variable. For example, to install to /tmp/nestedvm, you can run make install prefix=/tmp.

Known issue: the version of binutils being used does not build properly with GCC 4.9... please try GCC 4.8 or clang

Below are some system-specific build instructions for this repository; pull requests with steps for other environments are certainly welcome.

⁠Debian 8 etc:

apt-get -y update && apt-get -y upgrade
apt-get -y install build-essential libgmp-dev libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev git curl openjdk-7-jdk gcc-4.8 g++-4.8
cd /usr/local/src
git clone https://github.com/bgould/nestedvm
cd /usr/local/src/nestedvm
make dist CC=gcc-4.8 CXX=g++-4.8

⁠CentOS 7:

yum -y update
yum install -y java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel git gmp-devel libmpc-devel mpfr-devel
yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"
cd /usr/local/src
git clone https://github.com/bgould/nestedvm
cd /usr/local/src/nestedvm
make dist