The wiki and the web are curiously absent of the right runes to boot a vexpress model so I had to work from first principles to work it out. Use the more modern -drive notation so alternative backends can be used (unlike the hardwired -sd mode).
Signed-off-by: Alex Bennée <[email protected]> Cc: Anders Roxell <[email protected]> --- v2 - reword kernel build. --- docs/system/arm/vexpress.rst | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 28 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/system/arm/vexpress.rst b/docs/system/arm/vexpress.rst index 7f1bcbef07..3e3839e923 100644 --- a/docs/system/arm/vexpress.rst +++ b/docs/system/arm/vexpress.rst @@ -58,3 +58,31 @@ Other differences between the hardware and the QEMU model: ``vexpress-a15``, and have IRQs from 40 upwards. If a dtb is provided on the command line then QEMU will edit it to include suitable entries describing these transports for the guest. + +Booting a Linux kernel +---------------------- + +Building a current Linux kernel with ``multi_v7_defconfig`` should be +enough to get something running. Nowadays an out-of-tree build is +recommended (and also useful if you build a lot of different targets). +In the following example $BLD points to the build directory and $SRC +points to the root of the Linux source tree. You can drop $SRC if you +are running from there. + +.. code-block:: bash + + $ make O=$BLD -C $SRC ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- multi_v7_defconfig + $ make O=$BLD -C $SRC ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- + +By default you will want to boot your rootfs off the sdcard interface. +Your rootfs will need to be padded to the right size. With a suitable +DTB you could also add devices to the virtio-mmio bus. + +.. code-block:: bash + + $ qemu-system-arm -cpu cortex-a15 -smp 4 -m 4096 \ + -machine type=vexpress-a15 -serial mon:stdio \ + -drive if=sd,driver=file,filename=armel-rootfs.ext4 \ + -kernel zImage \ + -dtb vexpress-v2p-ca15-tc1.dtb \ + -append "console=ttyAMA0 root=/dev/mmcblk0 ro" -- 2.20.1
