Arm Versatile boards (versatileab, versatilepb)

The Arm Versatile baseboard is emulated with the following devices:

• ARM926E, ARM1136 or Cortex-A8 CPU
• PL190 Vectored Interrupt Controller
• Four PL011 UARTs
• SMC 91c111 Ethernet adapter
• PL110 LCD controller
• PL050 KMI with PS/2 keyboard and mouse.
• PCI host bridge. Note the emulated PCI bridge only provides access to PCI memory space. It does not provide access to PCI IO space. This means some devices (eg. ne2k_pci NIC) are not usable, and others (eg. rtl8139 NIC) are only usable when the guest drivers use the memory mapped control registers.
• PCI OHCI USB controller.
• LSI53C895A PCI SCSI Host Bus Adapter with hard disk and CD-ROM devices.
• PL181 MultiMedia Card Interface with SD card.

Booting a Linux kernel

Building a current Linux kernel with versatile_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.

$ make O=$BLD -C $SRC ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- versatile_defconfig
$ make O=$BLD -C $SRC ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf-

You may want to enable some additional modules if you want to boot something from the SCSI interface:

CONFIG_PCI=y
CONFIG_PCI_VERSATILE=y
CONFIG_SCSI=y
CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_2=y

You can then boot with a command line like:

$ qemu-system-arm -machine type=versatilepb \
    -serial mon:stdio \
    -drive if=scsi,driver=file,filename=debian-buster-armel-rootfs.ext4 \
    -kernel zImage \
    -dtb versatile-pb.dtb  \
    -append "console=ttyAMA0 ro root=/dev/sda"