Concluding discussions that go back to last year's Linux Plumbers Conference, I can finally announce the formation of a QEMU SIG under the governance of the RISC-V Applications & Tools HC.
This group will drive our strategy for a fast functional model, coordinate the development of QEMU within our community, and drive the outreach to the upstream QEMU project.
The group's preliminary charter reads as follows:
QEMU SIG Preliminary Charter
QEMU has become the de-facto fast-model for software development on RISC-V.
The QEMU/Fast model SIG will
Coordinate with the upstream QEMU community and RISC-V contributors.
Identify gaps and maintain a status/roadmap for RISC-V support in QEMU.
Recruit reviewers and contributors to QEMU within the RISC-V ecosystem.
Provide guidance and training for other groups within RISC-V that contribute to QEMU (e.g., as part of the Acceptance Criteria for new extensions) and assist/coordinate the upstreaming of RISC-V specific contributions.
The group will work closely with the Applications & Tools HC and coordinate with the other HCs and ICs to ensure that QEMU supports the ongoing standardisation efforts within RISC-V.
I am grateful to Alistair Francis (WDC) and Liu Zhiwei (T-Head) for stepping forward and volunteering to act as Chairs during the inception of this group. Their respective experience (Alistair is the RISC-V maintainer of QEMU and Zhiwei has supported QEMU within T-Head) in this field will serve us well, as we work to establish a final charter and find permanent leadership for the group.
Alistair and Zhiwei's respective bio are:
Alistair Francis currently works at Western Digital as part of the RISC-V software research team. He is the QEMU RISC-V maintainer; developing, reviewing and merging QEMU patches. He also has a focus on security, specifically secure operating systems related to Root of Trust (RoT) devices. He is the vice-chair of the RISC-V Security Response Team. He is actively working on supporting Tock and the Tock ecosystem on the OpenTitan platform. He also contributes to and maintains a range of different software projects, from low level operating systems to high level system applications. He has contributed to glibc, strace, OpeOCD, Oreboot, OpenEmbedded, Linux, Xvisor, OpenSBI, seL4, SweRV-ISS, Open Compute Project security specifications and a variety of other projects.
Liu Zhiwei has been developing simulator, profiling tools, reference model at T-HEAD Semiconductor. His experience includes maintenance and optimization of C-SKY arch on QEMU since v2.8.0; the design and implementation of profiling suites for C-SKY and RISC-V, applicable to baremetal, RTOS, Linux applications; building benchmark slice system for micro architecture optimization; maintenance reference model for ARM-based QEMU.
I am looking forward to the first meetings of this group, and to continue working with Alistair and Zhiwei on improving QEMU,
Philipp Tomsich Chair, Applications & Tools Software HC
