QEMU Emulation for ARCv2 & ARCv3

Overview

This board configuration will use QEMU to emulate set of generic ARCv2 and ARCv3 hardware platforms.

The following features of ARC ISA cores are currently supported:

  • CPU: * ARCv2 EM * ARCv2 HS3x * ARCv3 HS5x * ARCv3 HS6x

  • Only little-endian configurations

  • Full 32 register set

  • ARC core free-running timers/counters Timer0 & Timer1

  • ARC core interrupt controller with multiple priority levels

  • DW UART

  • 5 slots for MMIO Virtio devices

Hardware

Supported Features

The following hardware features are supported:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

ARCv2 INTC

on-chip

interrupt controller

DW UART

on-chip

serial port

ARC TIMER0

on-chip

system clock

The kernel currently does not support other hardware features on this platform.

Devices

System Clock

This board configuration uses a system clock frequency of 1 MHz.

Serial Port

This board configuration uses a single serial communication channel with the DesignWare UART.

Known Problems or Limitations

The following platform features are unsupported:

  • Memory-protection unit (MPU)

  • MMIO Virtio Ethernet

Programming and Debugging

Use this configuration to run basic Zephyr applications and kernel tests in the QEMU emulated environment, for example, with the Basic Synchronization sample (note you may use qemu_arc/qemu_em, qemu_arc/qemu_hs, qemu_arc/qemu_hs5x or qemu_arc/qemu_hs6x depending on target CPU):

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b qemu_arc/qemu_em samples/synchronization
west build -t run

This will build an image with the synchronization sample app, boot it using QEMU, and display the following console output:

*** Booting Zephyr OS build zephyr-v2.2.0-2486-g7dbfcf4bab57  ***
threadA: Hello World from qemu_arc!
threadB: Hello World from qemu_arc!
threadA: Hello World from qemu_arc!
threadB: Hello World from qemu_arc!

Exit QEMU by pressing CTRL+A x.

Debugging

Refer to the detailed overview about Application Debugging.

References

1.`Programmer’s Reference Manual for ARC HS

<https://www.synopsys.com/dw/doc.php/iip/dwc_arc_hs4xd/latest/doc/ARC_V2_PublicProgrammers_Reference.pdf>`_