RVVM

RVVM is a virtual machine/emulator for RISC-V guests, which emphasizes on performance, security, lean code and portability. It runs a lot of guest operating systems, including Linux, Haiku, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc, and has a rich device infrastructure (Network adapters, NVMe, HID, PCIe with MSI). Emulation performance is very competitive thanks to RVJIT dynamic binary translator. Portability is taken very seriosly and only requires C99 as a baseline. We also aim to run RISC-V applications on a foreign host without full OS guest (userland emulation, i.e. RISC-V containers).

To prevent theoretical VM escape vulnerabilities from being exploited, we enforce kernel-level isolation, strict codestyle and compiler warning policies, extensive static analysis and use of sanitizers/fuzzers.

The RVVM infrastructure is meant to be modular and embeddable - the whole project is contained within "librvvm" library and a reference VM manager to make use of it. GDB debug server is also available for kernel developers and alike. The goal under NGI Zero Core is to implement first-class KVM hypervisor suport for RISC-V, as well as x86_64 & ARM64 hypervisor variant (reusing the same device emulation infrastructure), shadow pagetable acceleration for guest MMU, and RISC-V Vector extension support which is gaining serious traction and is much needed for software testing. Additionally, a special deduplication image format is in the works which should give immense storage benefits in terms of space saved for build farms and cloud use, as well as atomic write consistency for reliability.