WerWolv's RISC-V Emulator Boots Linux from Scratch

RISC-V Emulator and Linux System from Scratch

WerWolv's riscv-emulator is an rv32ima emulator written from scratch that can boot Linux. The repo holds the full emulator and minimal emulated devices in /lib, machine configuration and WebAssembly-facing functions in /main, and the build configs in /boot: a crosstool-ng toolchain config, a Linux kernel defconfig, a minimal device tree, an init program, and an initramfs generated with gen_init_cpio. It accompanies a blog post on bringing up Linux.

A RISC-V rv32ima emulator capable of booting Linux
  1. kvemkon

    Discussion of the corresponding blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553988

  2. Flex247A

    Slight tangent: I made a similar but simpler project that runs DOOM on a custom RISC-V emulator: https://github.com/lalitshankarch/rvcore

  3. westurner

    Emulation of RISC-V in software;

    container2wasm has TinyEmu for RISC-V.

    dearchap/tinyemu: https://github.com/dearchap/tinyemu

    Qemu also supports 32bit and 64bit RISC-V: "RISC-V System emulator — QEMU documentation" https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-riscv.html

    Emu86 emulates RISC-V in Python and also WASM now IIRC:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41899475 ..

    https://github.com/gcallah/Emu86/blob/master/assembler/virtu... :

    class RISCVMachine(VirtualMachine):

    Also:

    (Box96/Box64 emulates x86 on ARM64 and RISC-V; e.g. Portal)

    From

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44979868 :

    > openhwgroup has open Verilog implementations of RISC-V cores from 2 stages through 6 stages that will boot Linux: https://github.com/openhwgroup

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2026-09-11