Virtualization

NVMe emulation in QEMU – Adding custom admin and IO commands

QEMU is a wonderful system emulator capable of running full x86 systems with PCIe and NVMe amongst many other platforms. QEMU is not only versatile, very fast, but also open-source ! At REDS we use QEMU to facilitate development of hardware through emulation, for example emulating FPGA platforms in software before going to real hardware, e.g., Full System Simulation (FSS), Zynq Software-Hardware CoSimulation. The full visibility over the system through emulation make development and debugging very effective. With a QEMU…

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Accessing the RAM of a QEMU Emulated System from another Process

Sometimes it may be of interest to expose the RAM of a hardware platform emulated in QEMU to an outside process, e.g., for monitoring, testing, or co-simulation. The QEMU monitor allows to inspect the memory but is not necessarily the most practical tool when you need to access it from another process, e.g., a C program or an external simulator, maybe Questasim simulating a device written in SystemVerilog. In this post I will show how to make the memory of…

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Smart Object Oriented (SOO) Technology

Introduction Smart Object Oriented (SOO) technology is the result of many years of research and development in the field of embedded systems including hardware and software topics such as ARM microcontrollers, System-on-Module integration, operating systems and software virtualization. The SOO framework has been released publicly on Gitlab in March 2020 under the GPLv2 Licence. Additional discussions and technical hints are also available in the dedicated forum. In early 2014, Prof. Daniel Rossier introduced the notion of Smart Object and the…

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Running Questasim on any OS through Docker

Questasim When doing HDL simulation Questasim is one of our main tools. However it only runs on Windows and GNU/Linux. Although we  mostly use GNU/Linux machines Questasim is not compatible with all distributions. This mainly because of library version compatibility, albeit this being fixable, it is a pain to do (find out which library is the culprit and which version is needed). So creating a Docker image seems like a good solution. It provides a known fixed environment to Questasim…

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About This Site

Technical articles related to the development work performed at the REDS institute, HEIG-VD (Switzerland).

The REDS institute is part of the High School of Engineering, Vaud. Its core skills involve board conception, firmware development and FPGA programming.

Find more at http://www.reds.ch