QEMU Emulation for ARM Cortex-A72

Overview

This board configuration will use QEMU to emulate a Raspberry Pi 4B hardware platform based on the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC.

This configuration provides support for an ARM Cortex-A72 CPU and these devices:

ARM architected timer
ARM GIC-400 interrupt controller
ARM PL011 UART controller
Broadcom BCM2835 AUX UART controller
Broadcom BCM2835 clock/reset manager (CPRMAN)
Broadcom BCM2835 DMA controller
Broadcom BCM2835 framebuffer controller
Broadcom BCM2835 GPIO controller
Broadcom BCM2835 hardware random number generator
Broadcom BCM2835 I2C (BSC) controller
Broadcom BCM2835 mailbox controller
Broadcom BCM2835 SD/MMC host controller
Broadcom BCM2835 SPI controller
Broadcom BCM2835 system timer
Broadcom BCM2835 thermal sensor
Broadcom BCM2835 USB host controller
Raspberry Pi VideoCore firmware property interface
Synopsys DWC2 USB2 host controller

Hardware

Supported Features

The qemu_cortex_a72 board supports the hardware features listed below.

on-chip / on-board: Feature integrated in the SoC / present on the board.
2 / 2: Number of instances that are enabled / disabled.
Click on the label to see the first instance of this feature in the board/SoC DTS files.
vnd,foo: Compatible string for the Devicetree binding matching the feature.
Click on the link to view the binding documentation.

`qemu_cortex_a72/bcm2711` target

Type	Location	Description	Compatible
CPU	on-chip	ARM Cortex-A72 CPU1	`arm,cortex-a72`
Clock control	on-chip	Generic fixed-rate clock provider1	`fixed-clock`
Firmware	on-board	Raspberry Pi Firmware Interface1	`raspberrypi,bcm283x-firmware`
GPIO & Headers	on-chip	BCM2711 GPIO1 1	`brcm,bcm2711-gpio`
Interrupt controller	on-chip	ARM Generic Interrupt Controller v21	`arm,gic-v2`
LED	on-board	Group of GPIO-controlled LEDs1	`gpio-leds`
Mailbox	on-chip	Broadcom BCM2711 VideoCore mailbox1	`brcm,bcm2711-mbox`
Pin control	on-chip	Broadcom BCM2711 pin controller1	`brcm,bcm2711-pinctrl`
RNG	on-chip	Broadcom iProc RNG200 Random Number Generator1	`brcm,iproc-rng200`
Serial controller	on-chip	ARM PL011 UART1 4	`arm,pl011`
Serial controller	on-chip	BCM2711 UART1	`brcm,bcm2711-aux-uart`
SRAM	on-chip	Generic on-chip SRAM2	`mmio-sram`
Timer	on-chip	per-core ARM architected timer1	`arm,armv8-timer`

Programming and Debugging

The qemu_cortex_a72 board supports the runners and associated west commands listed below.

	flash	debug	debugserver
qemu	✅ (default)	✅ (default)	✅

Use this configuration to run basic Zephyr applications and kernel tests in the QEMU emulated environment, for example, with the Basic Synchronization sample:

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b qemu_cortex_a72 samples/synchronization
west build -t run

This will build an image with the synchronization sample app, boot it using QEMU, and display the following console output:

*** Booting Zephyr OS build v4.4.0-2646-g284aabd6a6c1 ***
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on qemu_cortex_a72!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on qemu_cortex_a72!
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on qemu_cortex_a72!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on qemu_cortex_a72!
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on qemu_cortex_a72!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on qemu_cortex_a72!
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on qemu_cortex_a72!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on qemu_cortex_a72!

Exit QEMU by pressing CTRL+A x.

Debugging

Refer to the detailed overview about Application Debugging.

To attach GDB over the QEMU GDB stub (enabled via -s flag):

gdb-multiarch build/zephyr/zephyr.elf \
  -ex "target remote localhost:1234"