Building an embedded Linux system emulator
Gilad Ben-Yossef December 14th, 2008
One of the hallmarks of embedded system programming is working with specialized hardware. Unfortunately, embedded system developers do not always have the luxury to develop and test their code on the actual hardware they target. Often, the hardware is developed in tandem with the system software and therefore it it is not available for much of the embedded system software development cycle.
While one can develop and test much of our code on a PC running Linux, such a PC is a very different environment from the target board. More often then not, the target board is not even of the same architecture as the PC. A solution to this problem can be obtained by using an emulator – a software tool that executes software code of our target platform in a virtual machine that is running on our development host, and running our system software in it.
The following article describes how to build an embedded Linux system running inside an emulator which can be used to develop, test and debug target code even without access to target hardware.
