[U-Boot] practicality of demonstrating u-boot in a QEMU session?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm teaching some embedded linux next week and, while i will have
physical boards for the students to play with, i'd also like to
demonstrate basic u-boot within a QEMU session as far as that's
practical.

  the boards themselves will be powerpc-based lite5200 (icecube)
systems all currently populated with u-boot (some old versions, some
newer) so certainly they'll have u-boot on the systems when the time
comes to start running them.

  regarding the QEMU session, i get the impression that QEMU and
powerpc still have problems but, if it's a QEMU session, i'm free to
choose the architecture so picking ARM is probably a good bet.

  i found a couple useful articles online:

http://balau82.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/u-boot-for-arm-on-qemu/
http://balau82.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/booting-linux-with-u-boot-on-qemu-arm/

so i can use them as a starting point, but both of them are well over
a year old so i'm wondering if there's a more recent, canonical online
explanation of emulating u-boot in a QEMU session just for demo
purposes, and at what point the emulation breaks down given the lack
of actual underlying hardware.

  thanks for any pointers.  i've never tried u-boot in a QEMU session
before; hence the fairly intro-level request for help.

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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