Atmel AT91 is a series of common microcontrollers that contain ARM cores. The AT91SAM7 series in particular runs the ubiquitous ARM7TDMI. I found out that there is an open source program that emulates these microcontrollers (among many others): it is Skyeye.
Skyeye is a project that emulates big and small microcontrollers, and for this reason it complements QEMU, which is the current state of the art of open source emulators for cores devoted to applications. The old version 1.2.5 can be installed from Debian and Ubuntu repositories (package name: skyeye), while on sourceforge the latest version (currently 1.3.1) can be downloaded from source and then compiled. I noted that version 1.3.1 can only be built and installed without overriding the default prefix (that is “/opt/skyeye“), in order for it to work properly.
When simulating, Skyeye wants two files as input: an ELF executable and a configuration file. A simple executable for ARM7TDMI can be created with the EABI CodeSourcery toolchain as I explain in a previous post. Almost everything is identical except for the CPU type (the compiler option should be “-mcpu=arm7tdmi“) and the UART address (0xfffd001c). Once rewritten the “test.c“, “startup.s” and “test.ld” files, the commands to create the ELF executable are:
$ arm-none-eabi-as -mcpu=arm7tdmi -g startup.s -o startup.o $ arm-none-eabi-gcc -c -mcpu=arm7tdmi -g test.c -o test.o $ arm-none-eabi-ld -T test.ld test.o startup.o -o test.elf
Then the configuration file (I called it “skyeye.conf“) must be:
arch:arm cpu: arm7tdmi mach: at91 mem_bank: map=M, type=RW, addr=0x00000000, size=0x00400000 mem_bank: map=I, type=RW, addr=0xf0000000, size=0x10000000 uart:mod=term
The “uart:mod” line is for printing what’s sent to the serial port to the terminal. To launch the emulator:
$ skyeye -e test.elf -c skyeye.conf
To end the emulation, press CTRL-C.
Entries
riby
2010/11/10
hello balau
i want to simulate an image processing code on skyeye. i want to know how to program skyeye to achieve it ? Also can you tell me about some tutorials in order to learn this.
thanks you.
Balau
2010/11/13
Hello,
unfortunately I found very few documentation on Skyeye, but I think there’s more if you know Chinese language.
About your first question: it makes a great difference if you need to simulate an image processing code that runs on some kind of linux, or if you need to simulate a bare metal program.
In the first case, this section of Skyeye wiki explains how to run Linux on Skyeye; then you can add your program in the ramdisk filesystem.
In the second case, this series of articles is very good (here the PDF version).
riby
2010/11/18
thanks Balau