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Introduction

xemu is a RISC-V system emulator written in Rust. It boots OpenSBI, xv6, Linux, and Debian 13 to an interactive shell, and is the execution core of the ProjectX computer system project.

What xemu is

  • A full-system emulator (M / S / U privilege modes, MMU, devices)
  • RV32 / RV64 dual-target — single codebase via cfg
  • Supports the IMAFDC + Zicsr + Zifencei extensions, plus the privileged ISA with Sv32 / Sv39 MMU and PMP
  • Ships a debugger (xdb) with breakpoints, watchpoints, expression evaluation, disassembly, and reference-comparison differential testing against QEMU and Spike
  • Uses a clean, trait-based device bus with lock-free single-hart hot path

What xemu is not

  • Not a JIT. It's a pure interpreter with a decoded-instruction cache.
  • Not a cycle-accurate simulator — it's faithful to architectural semantics, not microarchitectural timing.
  • Not hardware-specific — it models the QEMU-virt-like platform with documented deltas.

How this book is organised

  • Getting Started — build xemu, run your first kernel.
  • Usage — drive each boot target, use the debugger, run benchmarks.
  • Internals — how the CPU, memory subsystem, and devices are implemented.
  • Reference — tables of supported ISA, memory map, environment variables, and HAL API.
  • Contributing — the iteration workflow and how to propose a new feature.

For the development roadmap and landed-phase status, see ../PROGRESS.md. For feature-level specifications, see /.ark/specs/features/.