What do I need for development for an ARM processor?

Question

I'm familiar with X86[-64] architecture & assembly. I want to start develop for an ARM processor. But unlike desktop processors, I don't have an actual ARM processor. I think I need an ARM simulator.

http://www.armtutorial.com/ say

An ARM assembly compiler will be required, the most accessible is the ARMulator.

I thought of downloading Armulator but found from http://forums.arm.com/index.php?showtopic=13744 that

Its not sold seperately. But you can download an eval of RVDS - which includes RVISS/ARMulator

I've downloaded & installed RVDS but It looks very complex. I'm unable to figure out what do I need to do to write ARM assembly & run it.

• I want to write in assembly not in C/C++. I don't have an ARM processor. What is a good simulator?
• Can any one please mention in short. How to write assembly & assemble & simulate using RVDS. Please be clear?
• Are there any other alternative ways. I can't afford buying any kind of boards.

• I always learn from books rather than tutorials. I'm following these two books:

  1. ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)
  2. ARM System-on-Chip Architecture (2nd Edition)

Do you have any better suggestions?

Solution 1

A few comments, not competing for a complete answer to the posters question.

The beagleboard is cool, $150 but it takes another $150 in usb stuff to make it useful. The embest beagleboard is cheaper overall due to the lack of stuff you have to buy to go with it. But now there is the hawkboard, also an omap based board, costs under $100 and so far seems very well done. I am liking it more than the beagleboard at the moment, far less painful.

The open-rd board offers far more than the beagleboard for that price range, something to look into if/when you have a toy budget. both the open board and the enclosed for another $100 have a full sata connector so you can put a laptop drive on it and not have to use painfully slow flash devices or usb.

The poster doesnt have the resources to buy these toys. I would argue that if you continue to pursue this and get good at embedded ARM you will have the will and find the way. Which is why I mention Sparkfun and others have $30-$50 boards that work out of the box. Post a question to stackoverflow before you buy though asking which is better. I have many and there are a number of them I found unusable or too painful to bother with, I wouldnt want you to spend all your toy budget on something that is not worth having.

I have some qemu arm integrator example code laying around here, let me package it up and provide a working example. I have lots of other arm and gba code laying around, maybe I will post that as well.

The ARM architecture started out and last time I worked with their people/tools using an emulator called the armulator (google/wikipedia it). So emulating arm in particular is not uncommon.

Writing your own emulator would/could be a fun project or taking an existing one and adding your own peripherals. qemu and mame are too bulky to play with as-is, you might be able to extract the arm from mame without too much trouble.

Solution 2

You could get yourself something like a BeagleBoard to play with - they only cost around $200. You can install Ubuntu and the ARM toolchain on it.

Comments

[claws]

as I said, I can't afford buying any kind of boards. I really mean it. Isn't there any other solution?

[Z boson]

Have you used the Raspberry Pi (1 or 2)? If so, how do you like it compared to the BeagleBoard?

[Paul R]

@Zboson: if that question is addressed to me then no, I haven't actually played with the BeagleBoard or the Raspberry Pi. I bought an Efika MX a few years ago so that I could play with Neon SIMD, but performance was somewhat disappointing.

[Z boson]

How have you learned Neon then?

[Paul R]

Well I learned enough to do some benchmarking - I implemented some filters etc, both using intrinsics and raw assembly. At that time gcc's code generation was pretty poor for Neon, so raw assembly was actually worthwhile (2x faster than intrinsics IIRC). Apparently gcc has improved in this area recently though.

[Z boson]

What hardware do you use now for Neon?

[Paul R]

I don't really, apart answering the occasional question here on SO. I still have the above-mentioned Efika MX, and I boot it up occasionally, but most of the work I do these days is on x86.