Re: [Qemu-devel] system emulation of non-x86 targets

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 02:41:48PM +0100, Fabrice Bellard wrote:
> 1) ARM kernel level emulation. It includes MMU emulation and exceptions. 
> If you know exactly what kind of ARM you want to emulate (StrongARM ?), 
> it is not difficult to add, provided you have the ARM MMU documentation.
StrongARM is my primary area of interest, but Intel's XScale is a close
second (I really wish I could afford a devkit for it).

As for documentation:
ARM Architecture Reference Manual, Second Edition.
Editor: David Seal
ISBN: 0-201-73719-1

is a good general referance on it (it's what the Linux ARM kernel people
recommend), and for the XScale stuff, see Intel's online tech document
entitled:
"Intel XScale Microarchitecture for the PXA250 and PXA210 Applications
Processors" 

> 2) Device drivers: some ARM specific device drivers need to be added. 
> The first task would be to find a working Linux ARM target which is 
> close to a PC, so that you can reuse most of the QEMU devices (in 
> particular IDE, serial, floppy and VGA). You need to add at least an IRQ 
> controller and a timer.
I'm not aware of any modern ARM system that has a floppy drive.

However, the netwinder is pretty damn close to a PC - IGS CyberPro2000
[x86, ppc, netwinder, (possibly some mips as well)] video, and a Winbond
SuperIO chip providing keyboard/mouse, IDE, serial, parallel and
probably a few more things (wouldn't surprise me if the chip has a
floppy controller, but it was just never wired up in the NetWinder
hardware). Any pointers on IRQ controller/timer stuff welcome (general
stuff or specific to QEMU), I'm going to dig into the details of the
Netwinder some more since I think it's a good match already.

> Personnally I think it would be cool to have the fastest ARM system on 
> Earth on your PC :-) If someone can work at the device drivers, I can 
> improve the ARM emulation core to simulate MMU and kernel mode.
I think some of the Intel XScale units would probably still outrun us,
given the speed hits of Software MMU in QEMU, as their core speeds go up
to 600Mhz. However, we could still have the fastest Netwinder on Earth
:-).

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
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