Can Hifive P550 be traced by Freedom Studio or Nexus Tracing?

HiFive Premier P550
1

Problem Description

I am currently working with the SiFive P550 core and need to perform real-time hardware instruction tracing for debugging and performance analysis. I am trying to determine the compatibility and the specific tooling requirements for this core.

Details

Specifically, I would like to know:

  1. Freedom Studio: Does the current version of Freedom Studio support instruction-level tracing for the P550? If so, are there specific hardware probes (e.g., Segger J-Link Ultra+ or SiFive Insight) required?

  2. Nexus Tracing: Does the P550 implementation strictly follow the RISC-V Nexus Trace (N-Trace) standard? Can I use standard Nexus-compliant decoders to capture the trace data?

  3. Trace Sink: Is the trace data typically routed to an on-chip SRAM buffer (SBA), or can it be streamed off-chip via a high-speed trace port on P550-based SoCs?

What I’ve Tried/Researched

  1. See this web https://www.sifive.cn/software/sifive-freedom-studio, But I cannot download this software; and Now, I have no Sifive P550 now.

  2. I searched many key-word in Google, but not found one blog/document to use.

2

@Nya, here is the response:

  1. Freedom Studio does not support the P550, as the P550 was marketed as a Linux board, and FS is bare-metal focused.

  2. SiFive trace implementation is not fully Nexus compliant even though SiFive’s decoder (available to SiFive customers) works with EIC7700X implementation.

  3. Trace data is only routed to system memory in EIC7700X’s implementation.

3

@Raza Thanks for your reply.

So, I would like to ask: Does SiFive still have any Linux boards that support trace circuitry or standard Nexus tracing? Or are there any other known RISC-V Linux boards that support trace circuitry or standard Nexus tracing?

4

Unfortunately we don’t and I am not aware of a commercially available board that would support external tracing.