[Qemu-devel] Creating a ipod simulator with qemu for debugging rockbox

[Qemu-devel] Creating a ipod simulator with qemu for debugging rockbox

[Alex Bennee]

Hi,

I'm currently doing some work on rockbox (www.rockbox.org) but keep
hitting bugs in some of the codec code that trigger
unhandled exceptions. Unfortunatly on the actual platform I'm limited
in the amount of information I can dump on the screen.
Not having direct access to the hardware and wthout JTAG this is a
little limiting.

Rockbox does have a simulation build which runs natively on the
development box. It's very useful for testing the
menu system but doesn't really help with the low level code as things
like PCM playback are handed off to SDL.

I'm wondering how much work it would be to create a QEMU system target
to emulate the iPod platform (specifically
a 5.5G iPod video). The system is based on a pp5021c which is
basically a SoC version of an ARM. I don't have a lot of
documentation on the chip apart from the implemented features in the
Rockbox OS. However I'd only need to emulate
the hardware that Rockbox touches.

I'm assuming with such a simulation if I did get exceptions I'd be
able to investigate the core with the normal cross-capable
gdb?

Does anyone know if anything like this has been undertaken before? Is
there an exisiting system emulation that makes a
good example to base work on?
-- 
Alex, homepage: http://www.bennee.com/~alex/
CV: http://www.bennee.com/~alex/cv.php