[Qemu-devel] hw/arm: add Lego NXT board

[Alexander Graf <alex@antistatix.de>]

Hi,

I developed a software in the loop simulator for the Lego Mindstorms NXT 
brick. It uses the Qemu ARM emulator to run the Robot's Firmware. I plan 
to release the simulator as an open source project. Now, I wonder if it 
makes sense to integrate the Qemu board implementation back into Qemu 
mainline or simply maintain it as an external set of patches.

The problem is that the qemu board I designed is not self-contained. It 
allows the firmware to read/write IO memory in order to read back sensor 
values from the simulated environment and to control actuators. The 
environment simulator is an external program which is connected to 
several qemu instances via posix named pipes using a simple 
communication protocol. Without pipe interaction the emulator can still 
be used to debug NXT firmware images without sensor/actuator interaction.

I'm happy to prepare a patch, but do you think it is of any value to 
integrate code that is not 100% self contained?

Best Regards
Alexander