Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

While mature solutions such as QEMU provide broad architectural coverage, they are optimized for generality rather than minimal footprint, rapid bring-up, or architectural experimentation. To examine system-level design trade-offs, gain fine-grained control over memory and execution behavior, and enable lightweight Linux-based sandboxing and verification, we built a RISC-V system emulator from scratch.

rv32emu [1] supports RV32IMACF with Zifencei and Zicsr, along with CLINT, MMIO, and a complete Sv32 three-level page table. Through VirtIO integration, it efficiently maps Linux guest services to host resources. A tiered JIT compilation framework accelerates Linux workloads while reducing memory consumption compared to QEMU.

This talk presents the architectural decisions behind building a compact yet Linux-capable RISC-V system emulator, highlighting trade-offs in ISA support, memory management, JIT design, and device virtualization, and sharing practical techniques with a lean footprint without sacrificing performance or correctness.

[1] https://github.com/sysprog21/rv32emu