QEMU has good debugging capabilities, such as gdbstub. But sometimes we have to run a QEMU process under GDB and set breakpoints in the QEMU source code. When the process breaks, we can easily inspect the QEMU state. But what about the guest state, how can we inspect it? For example, how to read the guest memory by virtual address when a GDB watchpoint is triggered?

In this blog post, we will discuss emulating 64-bit RISC-V system on QEMU and running Linux and BusyBox on this system. We’ll explore step-by-step how to build Linux kernel, QEMU and BusyBox for 64-bit RISC-V target. There is a guide from RISC-V foundation on that topic, but it doesn’t cover many important points, such as rootfs creation.

In this GitHub Pages blog I will post original materials about software and hardware engineering. So stay tuned and don’t miss a beat 😃.