KVM Forum 2025

Hexagon System emulation
2025-09-05 , 3.0.2

The hexagon architecture has had linux-user support for some time, but now is undergoing an effort to land support for system emulation upstream.

Hexagon DSPs are designed for energy-efficient computation. They're found in Snapdragon SoCs, with various functions: general computation offload, audio signals, cellular/wifi modem, sensors and more.

There's ~two/three main use cases we're targeting initially: "Hexagon Standalone OS" / Hexagon QuRT and Linux. I'll demonstrate booting these and explain what's been modeled.

In my talk, I'll also explain the progress and some of the unique challenges posed by the hexagon DSP (sub)system design.