u-boot-brain/doc/README.semihosting
Tom Rini 83d290c56f SPDX: Convert all of our single license tags to Linux Kernel style
When U-Boot started using SPDX tags we were among the early adopters and
there weren't a lot of other examples to borrow from.  So we picked the
area of the file that usually had a full license text and replaced it
with an appropriate SPDX-License-Identifier: entry.  Since then, the
Linux Kernel has adopted SPDX tags and they place it as the very first
line in a file (except where shebangs are used, then it's second line)
and with slightly different comment styles than us.

In part due to community overlap, in part due to better tag visibility
and in part for other minor reasons, switch over to that style.

This commit changes all instances where we have a single declared
license in the tag as both the before and after are identical in tag
contents.  There's also a few places where I found we did not have a tag
and have introduced one.

Signed-off-by: Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>
2018-05-07 09:34:12 -04:00

39 lines
1.7 KiB
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SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
/*
* Copyright 2014 Broadcom Corporation.
*/
Semihosting is ARM's way of having a real or virtual target communicate
with a host or host debugger for basic operations such as file I/O,
console I/O, etc. Please see
http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dui0471c/Bgbjjgij.html for more information.
For developing on armv8 virtual fastmodel platforms, semihosting is a
valuable tool since it allows access to image/configuration files before
eMMC or other NV media are available.
There are two main ARM virtual Fixed Virtual Platform (FVP) models,
Versatile Express (VE) FVP and BASE FVP (See
http://www.arm.com/products/tools/models/fast-models/foundation-model.php)
The initial vexpress64 u-boot board created here runs on the VE virtual
platform using the license-free Foundation_v8 simulator. Fortunately,
the Foundation_v8 simulator also supports the BASE_FVP model which
companies can purchase licenses for and contain much more functionality.
So we can, in u-boot, run either model by either using the VE FVP (default),
or turning on CONFIG_BASE_FVP for the more full featured model.
Rather than create a new armv8 board similar to armltd/vexpress64, add
semihosting calls to the existing one, enabled with CONFIG_SEMIHOSTING
and CONFIG_BASE_FVP both set. Also reuse the existing board config file
vexpress_aemv8a.h but differentiate the two models by the presence or
absence of CONFIG_BASE_FVP. This change is tested and works on both the
Foundation and Base fastmodel simulators.
The semihosting code adds a command:
smhload <image> <address> [env var]
That will load an image from the host filesystem into RAM at the specified
address and optionally store the load end address in the specified
environment variable.