[U-Boot-Users] can u-boot run standalone in qemu(qemu-system-arm) without kernel image(for mainstone II)

[Vlad Lungu]

wong wrote:
> hi, all
> 
> I'm a newbie to both u-boot and qemu.
> Maybe it's a silly question, but I can not find the solution through the
> Internet for almost 2 weeks, sorry :(
> 
> Here is my question:
> 
> I wanna run u-boot as a standalone app (or image?) in qemu, and I do't wanna
> any create linux image.
> Is that possible? I just wanna to study u-boot.

I have no idea if it is possible with that particular emulation, but I did something similar
with qemu-system-mips. Qemu loads a bootloader binary image  on startup (if available) with most
emulations, for you it should be named arm_bios.bin probably. You can tell Qemu from what directory
to load it with the -L option, so just create a symlink to u-boot.bin named arm_bios.bin and launch
qemu-system-mips -L . /dev/null (/dev/null is needed so it will not complain that you have no kernel
and no disk image)

When you pass the -kernel option to qemu, it usually has a very small internal bootloader to setup a
few registers and pass control to the kernel. I know it does this for mips.

> And now, my idea is to create a flash image with u-boot,  how about this
> way?
> 

It depends on how that particular machine is emulated. Check the -pflash option Qemu, it might help.

Regards,
Vlad