QEMU Emulation for ARM Cortex-A53

Overview

This board configuration will use QEMU to emulate a generic Cortex-A53 hardware platform.

This configuration provides support for an ARM Cortex-A53 CPU and these devices:

  • GIC-400 interrupt controller

  • ARM architected timer

  • PL011 UART controller

Hardware

Supported Features

The following hardware features are supported:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

GIC

on-chip

interrupt controller

PL011 UART

on-chip

serial port

ARM TIMER

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 62.5 MHz.

Serial Port

This board configuration uses a single serial communication channel with the CPU’s UART0.

Known Problems or Limitations

The following platform features are unsupported:

  • Writing to the hardware’s flash memory

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:

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b qemu_cortex_a53 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-v2.0.0-1657-g99d310da48e5 *****
threadA: Hello World from qemu_cortex_a53!
threadB: Hello World from qemu_cortex_a53!
threadA: Hello World from qemu_cortex_a53!
threadB: Hello World from qemu_cortex_a53!
threadA: Hello World from qemu_cortex_a53!
threadB: Hello World from qemu_cortex_a53!
threadA: Hello World from qemu_cortex_a53!
threadB: Hello World from qemu_cortex_a53!

Exit QEMU by pressing CTRL+A x.

Debugging

Refer to the detailed overview about Application Debugging.

Networking

The board supports the QEMU built-in Ethernet adapter to connect to the host system. See Networking with QEMU Ethernet for details.

It is also possible to use SLIP networking over an emulated serial port. Although this board only supports a single UART, so subsystems like logging and shell would need to be disabled, therefore this is not directly supported.

References

  1. (ID050815) ARM® Cortex®-A Series - Programmer’s Guide for ARMv8-A

  2. (ID070919) Arm® Architecture Reference Manual - Armv8, for Armv8-A architecture profile

  3. (ARM DAI 0527A) Application Note Bare-metal Boot Code for ARMv8-A Processors

  4. AArch64 Exception and Interrupt Handling

  5. Fundamentals of ARMv8-A