[Qemu-devel] [Bug 1216845] Re: qemu-system-arm semihosting always calls exit(0)

[Liviu Ionescu]

thank you for your suggestion.

as semihosting servers I use the j-link gdb server, openocd and qemu. if
I got it right, you suggest to modify all these servers to retrieve the
exit code from a specific location. as long as this is not documented in
the ARM manuals, I cannot recommend such a solution.

in the GNU ARM Eclipse project templates I  fixed the problem by using
my own semihosting routines, where exit returns different values for 0
and non zero, so I no longer depend on the newlib support for
semihosting.

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Title:
  qemu-system-arm semihosting always calls exit(0)

Status in QEMU:
  New

Bug description:
  In my embedded ARM project I have a bunch of unit tests that I run in
  a POSIX synthetic environment, and, as usual for POSIX processes,
  these tests return 0 for success and !=0 for error.

  Now I expanded the testing environment to run some of these tests
  compiled for ARM, under QEMU, with the tracing messages forwarded via
  the semihosting API.

  Up to now everything is fine with the emulation.

  However I have a problem with passing the failure code back to the
  operating system, to drive the continuous integration framework.

  I checked the arm-semi.c code and for SYS_EXIT and I discovered that
  the parameter passed is ignored and it always calls exit(0):

      case SYS_EXIT:
          gdb_exit(env, 0);
          exit(0);

  To solve my problem I temporarily made a patch, and for cases that
  should return non zero codes, I call an unsupported BKPT instruction,
  which makes QEMU abort, and pass an non zero code (1) back to the
  operating system.

      qemu: Unsupported SemiHosting SWI 0xf1

  This kludge is more or less functional, but is quite inconvenient.

  After checking the ARM manuals, I discovered that SYS_EXIT is not
  standard, and the 0x18 code used for it originally was used for
  angel_SWIreason_ReportException, which has a slightly different
  purpose.

  Now the question:

  Would it be possible to no longer ignore the code passed to 0x18, and
  if it is non zero, to call exit() with a different value?

  The suggested rule would be:

  if (code ==0 || code == 0x20026)
    exit(0);
  elif (code < 256)
    exit(code);
  else
    exit(1);

  The value 0x20026 means ADP_Stopped_ApplicationExit, and, if I
  understood it right, it means that the program terminated
  successfully. If this is not true, it can be removed from the first
  conditional statement.

  What do you think? Can this be added to arm-semi.c?

  
  Regards,

  Liviu

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