arm_emu_v8a

It contains my attempt to emulate an arm v8-a architecture, this project is for learning purposes, and not intended to be used in a professional environment. However, this project can be used to explore how code is executed on ARM CPU, and to read the underlying generated code.

The project is separated into 3 different libraries arm_emu_decodes_lib, arm_emu_lib, and compilation_lib, and an executable that uses these libraries to create a GUI.

Documentation and credits

This project is inspired by cpp_box and use the concepts of it as its bases. It will be implementing parts of AARCH64 only on ARM v8-a CPUs based on the following documentations:

• https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0487/fc/
• https://developer.arm.com/architectures/learn-the-architecture/armv8-a-instruction-set-architecture

Dependencies

On linux, to compile the binaries, please install the following libraries:

// libx11-dev, libxrandr-dev, libxinerama-dev, libxcursor-dev, libxi-dev, and mesa-common-dev
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libxrandr-dev \
		libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev mesa-common-dev

On windows, make sure OpenGL is installed (usually is installed with the Graphics driver)

Building

1- Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/MichaelRizkalla/arm_emu_v8a.git

2- Init all submodules

git submodule init
git submodule update

3- Build

On Linux:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

On Windows:

mkdir build 
cd build
cmake ..

Getting started

1. Install clang compiler v11 or later to be used later.
2. Build the project using a C++20 complaint compiler
3. Run arm_emu executable
4. Create a CPU from Edit->Create CPU
5. Load a Clang compiler from Edit->Load Compiler
6. Write your code, compile and load.
7. Step in the program and view CPU registers and stack changes

Remarks

Thanks to Jason Turner's talk "Applied Best Practices" that provoked me to pick a hard project to work on it. And his project cpp_box which I used as ground zero.

Future work

• Write documentation for each library
• Add unit tests and a better CI pipeline (currently almost no unit tests implemented)
• Support more instructions.
• Rework the GUI application as the current event system is not optimal. (Probably move to Qt as well)
• Extend compilation_lib to support more features during reading ELF files.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details