One of the research projects I am doing involves disassembling machine instructions (such as PTX ) to TCG IR and use the QEMU backends to generate code I need. Basically, I am planning to use QEMU as a dynamic translators, instead of the full system emulation it is developed for. I need a way to hack out the piece of QEMU used specifically for dyn translations so that i do not need a machine image to start the dyn trans parts of QEMU. I am fairly familiar with the QEMU code base. I would like to hear suggestions.