Ben's Reduced Instruction set Computer (BRIC) Virtual Machine (VM)

This repo contains the source code and specifications for a VM that simulates the BRIC instruction set. This project is mainly academic and I haven't gotten around to writing proper tests yet, so there is a high likelihood of bugs being present.

For an implentation of the BRIC architecture see BRIC_IMPL

The instruction set is detailed in ISA and the save formats in vmformat.

Building

Prerequisites: You need to have git and a rust toolchain installed.

1. Get the source using git and the move into the directory you just cloned.
2. Run cargo build --release
3. Your executables should be in ./target/release

Running

1. Write some basm code. You can look at the example, which doesn't do much but showcases some of the assembler features. You can also look at the assembly docs.
2. Assemble your basm code into a bvm file using the basm executable.
3. Run your code in the debugger using the bdb executable. See bdb for help.

Project Outline

This project is far from finished. Here are some features that are yet to be implemented:

1. Graphics MMIO. The idea is to implement a very basic graphics API and display the result using a custom display crate built using the WGPU crate.
2. Network MMIO for network communication.
3. Implementation of the computer on an FPGA using verilog
4. Extend the assembler to include some simplifying mnemonics
5. Implement the instruction set as a LLVM backend

Furthermore here are some niceties for existing features that are missing:

• Serialization and deserialization of memory mappings and memory blocks
• UART support in the VM
• Debugger memory editing
• Debugger memory breakpoints
• Comprehensive tests. Currently there exist limited tests for the VM but more comprehensive tests would be nice and testing the assembler would also be important.