Concise monthly summary for 2025-04 focusing on checkpointing enhancements in OpenXiangShan/NEMU. Highlights include nanopb-backed memlayout generation and trap-driven checkpointing to boost reliability and reproducibility for debugging and live-analysis workflows.

March 2025 monthly summary focusing on key accomplishments that add business value and improve build reliability across OpenXiangShan repositories.

Concise monthly summary for Feb 2025 focusing on business value and technical achievements. Two major features delivered in OpenXiangShan/NEMU: Flash Memory Dump in Checkpointing enabling dump of flash memory content as part of checkpointing with RISC-V 64-bit support, updated serializer, and CI steps to generate/restore flash data checkpoints; Enhanced Profiling Mode for Simpoint BBV enabling detailed basic block data (first and second PCs) for simpoint_bbv with new config option and updated profiling output logic. No major bugs fixed this month; focus on reliability and data correctness. Overall impact: improved checkpoint fidelity, richer performance profiling, enabling faster debugging and more accurate performance modeling. Technologies demonstrated include RISC-V 64-bit, checkpointing, flash data serialization, CI automation, and simpoint BBV data generation.

January 2025 was a focused delivery cycle across OpenXiangShan/NEMU and OpenXiangShan/ready-to-run, emphasizing stability, scalability, and automation to accelerate development and testing. Key outcomes include a Spike simulator upgrade with CI alignment for deterministic, reproducible builds; enhanced checkpoint storage in flash with serialization improvements and better file naming; auto-loading of checkpoints to simplify state restoration; expanded flash capacity to 512MB to accommodate larger configurations; and difftest enhancements for PMP synchronization along with signature alignment improvements. These changes reduce maintenance overhead, improve test fidelity, and enable larger, more complex configurations in production-like environments.

December 2024 performance highlights across OpenXiangShan repositories, focusing on reliability, cross-model synchronization, and testing automation. Key features delivered include default zstd checkpointing, improved image loading and MMIO testing capabilities, cross-model PMP state synchronization, and robust difftest/Spike integration. These efforts reduce checkpoint/restore risk, improve testing determinism, and accelerate validation across NEMU, riscv-isa-sim, and ready-to-run workloads.

November 2024 monthly summary for OpenXiangShan/NEMU: Delivered an automated Checkpointing Binary Conversion Script that converts a built fw_payload.bin into a checkpoint-capable binary. The script automates cloning/updating required repositories, builds targeted components, and constructs a ready-to-use binary for checkpoint workflows. This work reduces manual setup, enhances reproducibility, and speeds up checkpoint-based testing and recovery. Major bugs fixed: None reported.

October 2024 monthly summary for OpenXiangShan/NEMU focused on refactoring and bug fixes in the RISC-V instruction decoding path to improve maintainability and reliability.