Is any ARM platform emulation in qemu functional enough to run ARM v7 code in multicore emulation mode?

Question

It seems like qemu ( atleast version 2.0.0 ) have issues with running U-boot and distros of Linux on ARMv7 boards in in case of vexpress-a9 and vespress-a15. Have anyone here succeeded runing multicore ARMv7 Operating System? If yes what was qemu release version? I mean run with

qemu -M someplatform -cpu cores=2 ...

Lindbergh

Issues I wrote about are discussed here #37069188 – Lindbergh

"QEMU seems to be broken" is more of a bug report for the QEMU mailing list, than an on-topic programming question for Stack Overflow. – Elisabethelisabethville

That too, but also its sometimes possible to fix things by applying patches or cherrypicking commits from gitrepo, which is some kind of programming. ;) – Lindbergh

Answer 1

qemu-system-arm -M virt -cpu cortex-a15

This setup worked just fine:

qemu-system-arm \
-M virt \
-append 'root=/dev/vda' \
-cpu cortex-a15 \
-drive file='rootfs.ext2.qcow2,if=virtio,format=qcow2' \
-kernel zImage \
-nographic \
-smp '2'

Then:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

gives:

processor       : 0
model name      : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
BogoMIPS        : 125.00
Features        : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0xc0f
CPU revision    : 1

processor       : 1
model name      : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
BogoMIPS        : 125.00
Features        : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0xc0f
CPU revision    : 1

I also bet it would work with -M vexpress-a15 -cpu cortex-a15 but I didn't test that. If you want to try it out, just copy exactly what Buildroot says, and it will work as usual.

Tested in QEMU 2.11.0, Linux v2.16, with this setup.

Homemade