* Emulators are useful tools
- PC emulator (e.g. Docker on Mac, WSL on Linux)
- NES emulator -- fun and games, realtime output
- Also have debugging emulators
- Renode
* Renode Stack
- CPU cores written in C
- arm, i386, ppc, riscv, sparc, xtensa
- Windows, Mac, Linux
- Peripherals and UI written in C#
- Extensible via Python and C#
- Write once. Run anywhere. Using C# to define new peripherals
* Three major users
- Designers of new boards
- Reverse engineering exsisting hardware
- Silicon designers
* Designers of new boards
- One or more chips
- How are they connected?
- What weird hardware exists?
* Concurrent emulation of multiple devices
- Can connect multiple devices, e.g. via UART, GPIO, SPI, Ethernet, CAN...
- All devices are emulated using the same time source
- Helps to debug timing differences with different processors on a board
* Board definition format
- Easily define memory layout
- Easily move blocks around
- Only define what's necessary
- You don't need to be perfect, just good enough!
* Can read SVD files
* Hardware has Similarities
- Picture of existing register sets
- There are only so many combinations
- Rip. Mix. Burn. Many chips are just copies of one another.
* Tests in CI
* Reverse engineering existing hardware
* If it's a supported architecture, it's easy to run code
* LoadBinary and set PC
* Can skip much of the boot ROM
* Attach GDB
* Reproducible makes it easy to test theories
* Developing new Silicon blocks
* Betrusted hardware
- Create a new design in LiteX / Verilog
- Document the design
- Create a model
- Timing isn't as critical
*
Desktop Emulator
- VirtualBox
- VMWare
- Parallels
- HyperV
- WSL2/Docker
CPU Emulator
- qemu on Linux
- Rosetta on Mac