Group 10 QEMU implementation of the NXP S32K3X8EVB

This project aims to develop an implementation of the NXP S32K3X8EVB board in QEMU to provide a environment to develop applications on the given board. The project doesn't implement the whole board but only the basic memories and a couple of peripherals: UART and SPI. Furthermore to test the implementation a port of FreeRTOS is made using the NXP gcc toolchain.

Project structure

The project is split in a couple of folders:

• FreeRTOS_App: containing the application used to test the board and the peripherals
• gcc-10.2.0: NXP toolchain
• material: documents regarding the board functionalities and implementation
• qemu: modified qemu v9.0 with the added board
• docs: further documentation about the project and the presentation

Qemu structure

Qemu was modified in two points

Building QEMU

• To compile qemu first you need to install some dependencies:
• If on Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential zlib1g-dev libglib2.0-dev \
    libfdt-dev libpixman-1-dev ninja-build python3-sphinx \
    python3-sphinx-rtd-theme pkg-config libgtk-3-dev \
    libvte-2.91-dev libaio-dev libbluetooth-dev \
    libbrlapi-dev libbz2-dev libcap-dev libcap-ng-dev \
    libcurl4-gnutls-dev python3-venv gcc-arm-none-eabi cmake

• If on Fedora/RHL:

    sudo dnf update
    sudo dnf install ... TDB (is a bit strange, it varies too much distro by distro)

• Move into the qemu build folder:

    cd group10
    cd qemu/build

• Configure the target architectures: This is useful if you want only to compile the arm boards/cpus

    ./configure --target-list=arm-softmmu

• Build the new QEMU executable

    make -j$(nproc)

• To ceck if the board is available and correctly registered inside the QEMU environment

    ./qemu-system-arm -machine help

to list all the available machines

Running QEMU

To run QEMU with the implemented board we simply run

    ./qemu/build/qemu-system-arm -machine S32K3X8EVB -monitor stdio -m 128M

Running FreeRTOS on QEMU

To run FreeRTOS applications a Makefile has been made inside the ./FreeRTOS_App folder. Three are the main commands:

• make: used to compile the FreeRTOS application/firmware
• qemu_start: to start QEMU with the implemented board and the last compiled firmware
• qemu_debug: to start QEMU in debug mode with the implemented board and the last compiled firmware
• gdb_start: to start a gdb session that automatically attaches to the qemu_debug session. NOTE: on Ubuntu/Debian gdb-multiarch is required, meanwhile on Fedora/RHEL a fork of gdb is needed. Furthermore the GEF plugin is suggested to improve the debug capabilities

Material

• https://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/
• https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-arm.html#arm-system-emulator
• https://elixir.bootlin.com/qemu/v9.1.2/source
• https://medium.com/@matanbach44/hello-world-device-in-qemu-ae69b02872f4
• https://s-o-c.org/simulating-arm-cortex-m-with-qemu-tips/
• https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example
• https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/arm/musca.html
• https://airbus-seclab.github.io/qemu_blog/machine.html
• https://github.com/airbus-seclab/qemu_blog/blob/main/README.md
• https://github.com/airbus-seclab/qemu_blog/blob/main/machine.md
• https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/QOMConventions
• https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/hw/arm/stellaris.c
• https://github.com/qemu/qemu
• https://github.com/quarkslab/sstic-tame-the-qemu/blob/b002e5033e70aa881daed95f92285916ac008a07/qemu/hw/arm/samd21.c#L286
• https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/application-note/AN5413.pdf#G1027000

Authors

• Francesco Mignone (s336801)
• Leonardo Gallina (s293704 --> s349363)
• Andrea Baraldi (s339846)
• Silvia Bonenti (s339232)
• Lorenzo Parata (s343744)

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)