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

Fig. 177 Qemu (Credit: qemu.org)

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

GIC-400 interrupt controller

ARM architected timer

PL011 UART controller

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.

This board configuration uses a system clock frequency of 62.5 MHz.

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

The following platform features are unsupported:

Writing to the hardware’s flash memory

Use this configuration to run basic Zephyr applications and kernel tests in the QEMU emulated environment, for example, with the Synchronization Sample:

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

Exit QEMU by pressing CTRL+A x.

Refer to the detailed overview about Application Debugging.

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

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

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

AArch64 Exception and Interrupt Handling

Fundamentals of ARMv8-A