Emulate cortex-a53 (arm64) in qemu

Question

I would like to emulate with qemu an aarch64 system. The system has been tested on the board and works perfectly. The board is based on the allwinner A64. I started using qemu from this repo : git://git.qemu.org/qemu.git but the command I run just doesn't start it, I get a black screen :

./qemu-system-aarch64 \
  -machine type=virt \
  -cpu cortex-a53 \
  -nographic \
  -smp 1 \
  -m 2048 \
  -kernel my_image
  -serial stdio

I'm not sure about the need of pointing to the kernel file and initrd one and there's no -v flag for qemu to debug

Answer 1

You can use gdb for debug kernel. Just start qemu as gdb server: need add another two options in the end: " -S -s" when you run qemu. After you could use gdb client from aarch64 cross tools for debugging your kernel. Also looks like '-dtb' options is also required.

Answer 2

I will say I've never used qemu, but I see that you're using nographic and not setting up a console. You can open a console connection to qemu, which will let you halt the emulated arm processor, and observe the registers and processor state. Try checking out this link, and search for "QEMU WITHOUT X":

https://www.aurel32.net/info/debian_arm_qemu.php

Edit: Full documenation of console commands is here: http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html#pcsys_005fmonitor