GDB Debugging ARM U-Boot on QEMU

1 Introduction

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. In this article, we will use it as a machine emulator and run the U-Boot on top of it. It will also be demonstrated about how to debug U-Boot with GDB.

MIPS Exceptions Initialization and Handling on Linux

Exceptions and interrupts are un-expected events that disrupt the normal flow of execution. Interrupts are unexpected events from outside the CPU core. Exceptions are from within the CPU, including memory translation exceptions, cache misses, unusual program conditions such as unaligned loads, system calls and traps, and so on.

MIPS architecture adopts precise exception mechanisms, and make it easy for the software to deal with the exceptions. After any exception, CP0 EPC register points to the correct place to restart execution after the exception is dealt with.

Learning the Linux Boot Memory Allocator (MIPS)

Do you ever look at the report of 'cat /proc/meminfo' and wonder why the reported MemTotal is not equal to the amount of memory you have for the system? The followed is an example report from one of my systems. It shows the total memory is 60860kB (59.4MB) from line 2:

1 # cat /proc/meminfo
2 MemTotal:          60860 kB
3 MemFree:           47448 kB
4 Buffers:               0 kB
5 Cached:             7180 kB
6 SwapCached:            0 kB
7 ... 

which is different from the amount of memory that bootloader gave to kernel, 64MB.

1 ...
2 ## Transferring control to Linux (at address 800042f0) ...
3 ## Giving linux memsize in MB, 64