QEMU User space emulator

Supported Operating Systems

The following OS are supported in user space emulation:

Linux (referred as qemu-linux-user)
BSD (referred as qemu-bsd-user)

Features

QEMU user space emulation has the following notable features:

System call translation:

QEMU includes a generic system call translator. This means that the parameters of the system calls can be converted to fix endianness and 32/64-bit mismatches between hosts and targets. IOCTLs can be converted too.

POSIX signal handling:

QEMU can redirect to the running program all signals coming from the host (such as SIGALRM), as well as synthesize signals from virtual CPU exceptions (for example SIGFPE when the program executes a division by zero).

QEMU relies on the host kernel to emulate most signal system calls, for example to emulate the signal mask. On Linux, QEMU supports both normal and real-time signals.

Threading:

On Linux, QEMU can emulate the clone syscall and create a real host thread (with a separate virtual CPU) for each emulated thread. Note that not all targets currently emulate atomic operations correctly. x86 and Arm use a global lock in order to preserve their semantics.

QEMU was conceived so that ultimately it can emulate itself. Although it is not very useful, it is an important test to show the power of the emulator.

Linux User space emulator

Command line options

qemu-i386 [-h] [-d] [-L path] [-s size] [-cpu model] [-g port] [-B offset] [-R size] program [arguments...]

-h: Print the help
-L path: Set the x86 elf interpreter prefix (default=/usr/local/qemu-i386)
-s size: Set the x86 stack size in bytes (default=524288)
-cpu model: Select CPU model (-cpu help for list and additional feature selection)
-E var=value: Set environment var to value.
-U var: Remove var from the environment.
-B offset: Offset guest address by the specified number of bytes. This is useful when the address region required by guest applications is reserved on the host. This option is currently only supported on some hosts.
-R size: Pre-allocate a guest virtual address space of the given size (in bytes). "G", "M", and "k" suffixes may be used when specifying the size.

Debug options:

-d item1,...: Activate logging of the specified items (use ‘-d help’ for a list of log items)
-p pagesize: Act as if the host page size was ‘pagesize’ bytes
-g port: Wait gdb connection to port
-one-insn-per-tb: Run the emulation with one guest instruction per translation block. This slows down emulation a lot, but can be useful in some situations, such as when trying to analyse the logs produced by the -d option.
-singlestep: This is a deprecated synonym for the -one-insn-per-tb option.

Environment variables:

QEMU_STRACE: Print system calls and arguments similar to the ‘strace’ program (NOTE: the actual ‘strace’ program will not work because the user space emulator hasn’t implemented ptrace). At the moment this is incomplete. All system calls that don’t have a specific argument format are printed with information for six arguments. Many flag-style arguments don’t have decoders and will show up as numbers.

Other binaries

user mode (Alpha)
- qemu-alpha TODO.
user mode (Arm)
- qemu-armeb TODO.
- qemu-arm is also capable of running Arm "Angel" semihosted ELF binaries (as implemented by the arm-elf and arm-eabi Newlib/GDB configurations), and arm-uclinux bFLT format binaries.
user mode (ColdFire)
user mode (M68K)
- qemu-m68k is capable of running semihosted binaries using the BDM (m5xxx-ram-hosted.ld) or m68k-sim (sim.ld) syscall interfaces, and coldfire uClinux bFLT format binaries.
The binary format is detected automatically.
user mode (Cris)
- qemu-cris TODO.
user mode (i386)
- qemu-i386 TODO.
- qemu-x86_64 TODO.
user mode (Microblaze)
- qemu-microblaze TODO.
user mode (MIPS)
- qemu-mips executes 32-bit big endian MIPS binaries (MIPS O32 ABI).
- qemu-mipsel executes 32-bit little endian MIPS binaries (MIPS O32 ABI).
- qemu-mips64 executes 64-bit big endian MIPS binaries (MIPS N64 ABI).
- qemu-mips64el executes 64-bit little endian MIPS binaries (MIPS N64 ABI).
- qemu-mipsn32 executes 32-bit big endian MIPS binaries (MIPS N32 ABI).
- qemu-mipsn32el executes 32-bit little endian MIPS binaries (MIPS N32 ABI).
user mode (NiosII)
- qemu-nios2 TODO.
user mode (PowerPC)
- qemu-ppc64 TODO.
- qemu-ppc TODO.
user mode (SH4)
- qemu-sh4eb TODO.
- qemu-sh4 TODO.
user mode (SPARC)
- qemu-sparc can execute Sparc32 binaries (Sparc32 CPU, 32 bit ABI).
- qemu-sparc32plus can execute Sparc32 and SPARC32PLUS binaries (Sparc64 CPU, 32 bit ABI).
- qemu-sparc64 can execute some Sparc64 (Sparc64 CPU, 64 bit ABI) and SPARC32PLUS binaries (Sparc64 CPU, 32 bit ABI).

BSD User space emulator

BSD Status

target Sparc64 on Sparc64: Some trivial programs work.

Quick Start

In order to launch a BSD process, QEMU needs the process executable itself and all the target dynamic libraries used by it.

On Sparc64, you can just try to launch any process by using the native libraries:
```
qemu-sparc64 /bin/ls
```

Command line options

qemu-sparc64 [-h] [-d] [-L path] [-s size] [-bsd type] program [arguments...]

-h: Print the help
-L path: Set the library root path (default=/)
-s size: Set the stack size in bytes (default=524288)
-ignore-environment: Start with an empty environment. Without this option, the initial environment is a copy of the caller’s environment.
-E var=value: Set environment var to value.
-U var: Remove var from the environment.
-bsd type: Set the type of the emulated BSD Operating system. Valid values are FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD (default).

Debug options:

-d item1,...: Activate logging of the specified items (use ‘-d help’ for a list of log items)
-p pagesize: Act as if the host page size was ‘pagesize’ bytes
-one-insn-per-tb: Run the emulation with one guest instruction per translation block. This slows down emulation a lot, but can be useful in some situations, such as when trying to analyse the logs produced by the -d option.
-singlestep: This is a deprecated synonym for the -one-insn-per-tb option.