Renode, Antmicro’s virtual development tool for multinode embedded networks, has received support for SiFive’s Freedom E310 and HiFive Unleashed development boards.

“Renode was created based on many years of experience with the development of software for embedded systems – both for gateways, on-board computers as well as sensor nodes and microcontrollers. Testing and developing physical embedded systems is difficult due to poor reproducibility and lack of insight into the current state of a system, especially in multinode scenarios,” Antmicro explains of the tool’s reason for being. “Renode addresses this issue by letting you run unmodified binaries, identical to the ones that you would normally flash onto their target hardware, on a virtual board or system of boards.

“One important aspect of the tool is that it simulates not only CPUs but entire SoCs (including e.g. heterogeneous multicore SoCs and various peripherals) as well as the wired or wireless connections between them, which allows users to address complex scenarios and test real production software.”

The latest release of the tool, Renode 1.4, brings new support for SiFive’s Freedom E310 RISC-V platform and its Linux-targeted HiFive Unleashed 64-bit RISC-V development board, covered in detail in our getting started guide. The new release also includes generic 64-bit RISC-V target emulation, support for 64-bit registers, initial support for EFM32, EFR32, and EZR32 microcontrollers from SiLabs, and numerous improvements and bug fixes.

More information, and the binary and source downloads, are available on the project’s GitHub repository.