All code was compiled and tested on a Cortex-A72 (ARMv8-A) processor running
- Ubuntu 21.04 using GNU Make 4.3. (64 bit)
- Ubuntu 23.10 (64 bit)
- Raspberry Pi OS (October 10th 2023 Release) (64 bit)
The folder bare-metal-aarch64-qemu contains a bare metal AArch64 Assembly program that outputs "Hello World!\n".
It is an adaption of this repository.
hello_world.elf can be tested with QEMU.
On a system with an AArch64 processor and qemu-system-aarch64 installed run:
qemu-system-aarch64 -M virt -cpu host -enable-kvm -nographic -kernel hello_world.elf
On another architecture it can be emulated. Remove -enable-kvm and replace -cpu host with -cpu cortex-a72 for example.
The folder bare-metal-aarch64 contains an adaption of bare-metal-aarch64-qemu.
The purpose of it, is to be run in a VM by the KVM test program (4. KVM Test Program).
The build process (Makefile) creates an ELF file.
- https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102432/0100
- https://github.com/freedomtan/aarch64-bare-metal-qemu
The folder elf-loader contains a c-program that is used
(by 4. KVM Test Program)
to load the required sections of an ELF file into the memory of the VM.
- Joseph Koshy, (2010, January, 12), "libelf by Example"
The cpp-file kvm_test.cpp contains a program that sets up an AArch64 VM and executes the bare-metal-aarch64/hello-world.elf program in the VM.
As a starting point, this KVM test program for x86 was used.
It is explained here.
To change the code from x86 to AArch64 the KVM API Documentation
and the QEMU source code were used.