Hello all, Apologies if I missed the answer in the docs, but I am wondering why the virt machine is limited to only 8 cores when running RISC-V 64 system emulation? I am interested in booting a 16, 24, or even 32 core SMP Linux kernel with OpenSBI as the bootloader on the generic virt machine before adding a custom machine definition. I was able to successfully boot Linux kernel 5.9.0 with OpenSBI v0.9 and 8 cores/harts with an ext4 filesystem provided by Buildroot.
I poked around the docs and source code a bit, and found mention of the core count limit in the docs ( https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/system/riscv/virt.html), but no reason as to why this is the limit. It also appears that providing a custom device tree blob and setting QEMU's -smp option to match might overcome this limitation, but it would be better if more than 8 cores was supported directly. Best, Mark *Mark Wyse* pronouns: he/him/his PhD Student Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington
