Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Towards an Heterogeneous QEMU

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 27/07/2015 15:54, Christian Pinto wrote:
> From the user point of view there is usually an operating system
> booting on the Master processor (e.g. Linux) at platform startup,
> while the other processors are used to offload the Master one from
> some computation or to deal with real-time interfaces. It is the
> Master OS that triggers the boot of the Slave processors, and
> provides them also the binary code to execute (e.g. RTOS, binary
> firmware) by placing it into a pre-defined memory area that is 
> accessible to the Slaves. Usually the memory for the Slaves is
> carved out from the Master OS during boot. Once a Slave is booted the
> two processors can communicate through queues in shared memory and
> inter-processor interrupts (IPIs). In Linux, it is the
> remoteproc/rpmsg framework that enables the control (boot/shutdown)
> of Slave processors, and also to establish a communication channel
> based on virtio queues.
> 
> Currently, QEMU is not able to model such an architecture, mainly 
> because only a single processor can be emulated at one time, and the
> OS binary image needs to be placed in memory at model startup.

Hi, you may be interested in the "multi-arch" patches here:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/351808

These do roughly what you are saying, though in a single QEMU process.

Paolo