ABSTRACT:
Software based processor emulators have been around for a long time
and predominantly used by developers of Operating Systems. With
virtualization technology becoming more common and gaining
in-processor support, these emulators have expanded to support several
processor architectures and a richer feature set. Consequently,
popular operating systems such as Linux have been adapted to run
within virtual environments seamlessly. As part of the software
development process, this virtualization technology has huge potential
to increase product quality and developer efficiency.
This paper looks at employing virtualization for in-house real-time application software development through QEMU, a popular open source emulator. It also details the process of establishing such an environment and looks at some of the advantages of such a development model for embedded systems.