Embedded Systems Architecture

Emulators

Another valid approach to run the code on the development machine, which is much less invasive for our code base and does not have specific portability requirements, is emulating the whole platform on the host PC. An emulator is a software that can replicate the functionality of an entire system, including its core CPU, memory, and a set of peripherals. Some of the modern virtualization hypervisors for PCs are derived from QEMU, a free software emulator capable of virtualizing entire systems, even with a different architecture from those of the machine where it runs. Since it contains the full implementation of the instruction set of many different targets, QEMU can run the firmware image, which had been compiled for our target, ...