In this series of articles, we have started with the introduction to ARM. In this article let us setup a lab to start writing programs in ARM assembly. We could either set up a virtual environment on your system based on ARM architecture such as qemu, or you could buy an ARM based device such as RasberryPi.
Our focus is to set up a virtual lab environment with Qemu, rather than writing programs on a real hardware device.
What is Qemu?
QEMU (short for "Quick EMUlator") is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor that performs hardware virtualization. QEMU is a hosted virtual machine monitor: It emulates central processing units through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of device models, enabling it to run a variety of unmodified guest operating systems.Simply put, it is an emulator which acts as a CPU. Qemu supports ARM, PowerPC, MIPS and even x86 emulation.
Steps to be followed
Lets begin with setting up a lab.Step 1: Download Qemu .
We can download Qemu from its official website - http://wiki.qemu.org/Download
Step 2: Install all the dependencies before installing Qemu.
We can use the following command to install dependencies.
$apt-get build-dep qemu
Step 3: Run the configuration script, to build Qemu for ARM processor.
Extract the downloaded Qemu archive and navigate to the qemu directory. in my case, it is as shown below.
$cd qemu-1.7.0
Run the commands shown below
$./configure --target-list=arm-softmmu
$make
$sudo make install
$qemu-img create ubuntu.img 10G
The next step is to install Ubuntu (ISO image in my current working directory)
$qemu -hda ubuntu.img -cdrom ubuntu-12.04.3-desktop-i386.iso -m 512 -boot d
From here, follow the same installation steps you would use on a real machine.
Once installed, you could boot the created virtual environment with the following command.
$qemu -m 512 -hda ubuntu.img
Drop an email at srini0x00@gmail.com if you face problems in setting up the lab, so that I can write other ways of doing it or probably make a video of the whole process.
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