We won’t be able to run any code on a RISC-V processor until we have an environment to do it in. Fortunately, we don’t need a physical RISC-V processor to do this – we’ll instead be using qemu.

 

QEMU has generally good support for RISC-V guests. It has support for several different machines. The reason we support so many is that RISC-V hardware is much more widely varying than x86 hardware. RISC-V CPUs are generally built into “system-on-chip” (SoC) designs created by many different companies with different devices, and these SoCs are then built into machines which can vary still further even if they use the same SoC.

 

QEMU can emulate both 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-V CPUs. Use the qemu-system-riscv64 executable to simulate a 64-bit RISC-V machine, qemu-system-riscv32 executable to simulate a 32-bit RISC-V machine.

 

You can check out the official QEMU RISC-V support page here

 

There is also an excellent hello world RISC-V in qemu written by twilco here