Simulating arm-linux binaries

Simulating arm-linux binaries

[Shaun Jackman]

Hello,

I'm adding support to sim/arm (arm-elf-run) to run statically linked
Linux binaries. The work is going well so far; I'm already able to run
a "Hello, world!" application linked against uClibc. Running a "Hello,
world!" application linked against glibc is proving to be a little
more difficult. If anyone else is interested in this work, and perhaps
in helping with this work, I'll send my current patch your way. I'll
be sending a patch upstream that works with uClibc shortly.

It irks me, though, that glibc isn't yet working. Particularly
annoying is that arm-elf-run and arm-elf-gdb 'target sim' are giving
different results. When I call arm-elf-run hello, glibc calls the
syscalls { uname, brk, brk mmap) and then dies shortly after the
simulated mmap fails (errno = ENOMEM) with unhandled instructions at
address 0x504 and 0x50c. When I run the same binary with arm-elf-gdb,
glibc calls the syscalls { uname, geteuid32, getuid32, getegid32,
getgid32, writev } and the writev call displays...
*** glibc detected *** corrupted double-linked list: 0xff00006d ***

These two invocations of the same binary seem to be going down very
different code paths within glibc. Any idea why that is? Is gdb
calling the ARMulator differently somehow than sim?

Cheers,
Shaun

Re: Simulating arm-linux binaries

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 03:28:47PM -0700, Shaun Jackman wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm adding support to sim/arm (arm-elf-run) to run statically linked
> Linux binaries. The work is going well so far; I'm already able to run
> a "Hello, world!" application linked against uClibc. Running a "Hello,
> world!" application linked against glibc is proving to be a little
> more difficult. If anyone else is interested in this work, and perhaps
> in helping with this work, I'll send my current patch your way. I'll
> be sending a patch upstream that works with uClibc shortly.

Have you considered just using qemu instead?  It supports ARM usermode
emulation, and has a gdb server as a bonus.

> These two invocations of the same binary seem to be going down very
> different code paths within glibc. Any idea why that is? Is gdb
> calling the ARMulator differently somehow than sim?

No idea - it shouldn't be.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC

Re: Simulating arm-linux binaries

[Shaun Jackman]

2005/11/14, Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>:
> Have you considered just using qemu instead?  It supports ARM usermode
> emulation, and has a gdb server as a bonus.

I didn't know qemu-arm existed. Thanks for the pointer.

I used this howto [1] to set up qemu-arm, but it's failing as follows:

$ qemu-arm -L arm arm/bin/ls
Unable to load interpreter
Segmentation fault
$ qemu-arm --version
qemu-arm version 0.7.2, Copyright (c) 2003-2005 Fabrice Bellard

[1] http://people.debian.org/~ballombe/qemu/qemu.html/

> > These two invocations of the same binary seem to be going down very
> > different code paths within glibc. Any idea why that is? Is gdb
> > calling the ARMulator differently somehow than sim?
>
> No idea - it shouldn't be.

Odd.

Cheers,
Shaun

Re: Simulating arm-linux binaries

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 03:59:12PM -0700, Shaun Jackman wrote:
> 2005/11/14, Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>:
> > Have you considered just using qemu instead?  It supports ARM usermode
> > emulation, and has a gdb server as a bonus.
> 
> I didn't know qemu-arm existed. Thanks for the pointer.
> 
> I used this howto [1] to set up qemu-arm, but it's failing as follows:
> 
> $ qemu-arm -L arm arm/bin/ls
> Unable to load interpreter
> Segmentation fault
> $ qemu-arm --version
> qemu-arm version 0.7.2, Copyright (c) 2003-2005 Fabrice Bellard

Afraid I don't know much about it; you may want to direct questions to
the qemu forums, or for ARM, annoy Paul Brook directly :-)

I've only worked with qemu system emulation, not user emulation.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC

Re: Simulating arm-linux binaries

[Shaun Jackman]

2005/11/14, Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>:
> Have you considered just using qemu instead?  It supports ARM usermode
> emulation, and has a gdb server as a bonus.

qemu-arm works very well with statically linked executables! In
conjunction with Linux binfmt, it makes testing arm-linux binaries a
breeze!

$ cat /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/arm-linux
enabled
interpreter /usr/bin/qemu-arm
flags:
offset 0
magic 7f454c4601010161

Cheers!
Shaun