Machina currently focuses on standard RISC-V ISA support. It would be useful to add optional vendor-specific instruction set support so that proprietary platform firmware can also be exercised in the emulator.
Motivation
Some bootloader and secure firmware research / application scenarios depend not only on standard RISC-V instructions, but also on vendor-defined ISA extensions used by specific SoCs or platform firmware stacks.
Without optional support for these non-standard instructions, it is difficult to use Machina for:
- bootloader experimentation on vendor platforms,
- secure firmware research,
- platform-specific firmware validation,
- early functional testing of proprietary firmware behaviors.
Proposal
Add an optional mechanism to support vendor-specific ISA extensions, for example through:
- configurable extension modules,
- pluggable instruction decode / execute hooks,
- or feature-gated vendor backends.
Example vendor would include: T-Head, Sifive etc.
Expected benefit
This would make Machina more useful as a firmware experimentation platform, especially for bootloader and secure firmware research targeting proprietary hardware environments, while keeping the default path focused on standard RISC-V behavior.
Machina currently focuses on standard RISC-V ISA support. It would be useful to add optional vendor-specific instruction set support so that proprietary platform firmware can also be exercised in the emulator.
Motivation
Some bootloader and secure firmware research / application scenarios depend not only on standard RISC-V instructions, but also on vendor-defined ISA extensions used by specific SoCs or platform firmware stacks.
Without optional support for these non-standard instructions, it is difficult to use Machina for:
Proposal
Add an optional mechanism to support vendor-specific ISA extensions, for example through:
Example vendor would include: T-Head, Sifive etc.
Expected benefit
This would make Machina more useful as a firmware experimentation platform, especially for bootloader and secure firmware research targeting proprietary hardware environments, while keeping the default path focused on standard RISC-V behavior.