QEMU ARM¶

QEMU for ARM supports a special ‘virt’ machine designed for emulation and virtualization purposes. This document describes how to run U-Boot under it. Both 32-bit ARM and AArch64 are supported.

The ‘virt’ platform provides the following as the basic functionality:

A freely configurable amount of CPU cores

U-Boot loaded and executing in the emulated flash at address 0x0

A generated device tree blob placed at the start of RAM

A freely configurable amount of RAM, described by the DTB

A PL011 serial port, discoverable via the DTB

An ARMv7/ARMv8 architected timer

PSCI for rebooting the system

A generic ECAM-based PCI host controller, discoverable via the DTB

Additionally, a number of optional peripherals can be added to the PCI bus.

See Devicetree in QEMU for information on how to see the devicetree actually generated by QEMU.

Building U-Boot¶

Set the CROSS_COMPILE environment variable as usual, and run:

For ARM:
```
make qemu_arm_defconfig
make
```
For AArch64:
```
make qemu_arm64_defconfig
make
```

Running U-Boot¶

The minimal QEMU command line to get U-Boot up and running is:

For ARM:

qemu-system-arm -machine virt -nographic -bios u-boot.bin

For AArch64:

qemu-system-aarch64 -machine virt -nographic -cpu cortex-a57 -bios u-boot.bin

Note that for some odd reason qemu-system-aarch64 needs to be explicitly told to use a 64-bit CPU or it will boot in 32-bit mode. The -nographic argument ensures that output appears on the terminal. Use Ctrl-A X to quit.

Additional persistent U-boot environment support can be added as follows:

Create envstore.img using qemu-img:

qemu-img create -f raw envstore.img 64M

Add a pflash drive parameter to the command line:

-drive if=pflash,format=raw,index=1,file=envstore.img

Additional peripherals that have been tested to work in both U-Boot and Linux can be enabled with the following command line parameters:

To add a Serial ATA disk via an Intel ICH9 AHCI controller, pass e.g.:

-drive if=none,file=disk.img,format=raw,id=mydisk \
-device ich9-ahci,id=ahci -device ide-drive,drive=mydisk,bus=ahci.0

To add an Intel E1000 network adapter, pass e.g.:
```
-netdev user,id=net0 -device e1000,netdev=net0
```
To add an EHCI-compliant USB host controller, pass e.g.:
```
-device usb-ehci,id=ehci
```

To add an NVMe disk, pass e.g.:

-drive if=none,file=disk.img,id=mydisk -device nvme,drive=mydisk,serial=foo

To add a random number generator, pass e.g.:
```
-device virtio-rng-pci
```

These have been tested in QEMU 2.9.0 but should work in at least 2.5.0 as well.

Enabling TPMv2 support¶

To emulate a TPM the swtpm package may be used. It can be built from the following repositories:

https://github.com/stefanberger/swtpm.git

Swtpm provides a socket for the TPM emulation which can be consumed by QEMU.

In a first console invoke swtpm with:

swtpm socket --tpmstate dir=/tmp/mytpm1   \
--ctrl type=unixio,path=/tmp/mytpm1/swtpm-sock --log level=20

In a second console invoke qemu-system-aarch64 with:

-chardev socket,id=chrtpm,path=/tmp/mytpm1/swtpm-sock \
-tpmdev emulator,id=tpm0,chardev=chrtpm \
-device tpm-tis-device,tpmdev=tpm0

Enable the TPM on U-Boot’s command line with:

tpm2 startup TPM2_SU_CLEAR

Debug UART¶

The debug UART on the ARM virt board uses these settings:

CONFIG_DEBUG_UART=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_UART_PL010=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_UART_BASE=0x9000000
CONFIG_DEBUG_UART_CLOCK=0