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Step by step ARM emulator

Started by assainator Jun 10, 2014 at 6:36 PM 3 replies 3.3k views

Original Post

Jun 10, 2014 at 6:36 PM

Hello everyone,

I'm writing an ARM backend for a compiler construction course and I've been searching for an ARM emulator that lets me step through my generated code instruction by instruction showing me the values of the registers.

All the emulators and simulators I've found are aimed at running full applications and/or operating systems as fast as possible but they don't offer the features I'm looking for.

Examples of what I'm looking for:

http://courses.missouristate.edu/kenvollmar/mars/ -- An emulator for MIPS

https://github.com/atzedijkstra/ssm -- An emulator for the SSM architecture.

Does anybody know of any emulators that have the features I'm looking for?

Thanks a lot in advance for any help.

Bregma

Jun 10, 2014 at 7:05 PM

Perhaps a combination of QEmu and GDB might work?

Promit

Jun 10, 2014 at 8:07 PM

I don't have any hands-on experience but what about this?

http://ds.arm.com/

DvDmanDT

Jun 10, 2014 at 10:43 PM

It would probably be fairly easy to create an instruction interpreter for some specific ARM architecture. For your particular purpose, that would probably be enough, but for most purposes you would need to simulate a lot more (peripherals in particular). For that to be useful, you typically also need it to run at a decent speed and so on. I've also heard rumors about legal issues with ARM in particular.

Edit: You might want to google Trace32. It's made for something completely different, but last time I checked they hade downloadable simulator versions for evaluation which just might cover your needs.

assainator

Jun 11, 2014 at 9:23 PM

Thanks for the input. I remembered that I still had a Raspberry Pi around, so I'm currently using it in combination with gdb.

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