GoKawiilOxide builds open-source sp-emu to emulate Cortex-M7/M33 chips in its rack simulator
Oxide has released sp-emu, an open-source tool that emulates Cortex-M7 and Cortex-M33 microcontrollers on illumos and Linux (x86 and ARM), replacing an earlier simulation-only stub called SpSim. The emulated devices run Oxide's Hubris firmware directly and communicate over sockets with the Management Gateway Service and Inter-Processor Communication Channel, allowing the company's Voxel virtual lab to interact with them as if they were real service processors. A key engineering challenge was replicating time: since Hubris schedules work off a 1ms SysTick and the emulator has no wall clock, the team built a custom clock that counts instructions rather than real time.