The Research And Implementation Of The Qemu-Based Embedded Validation Emulation Environment

The higher integration degree of functionalities, the more complex the embedded software (ESW) become thousands of times in airplane. The quality of the ESW is one of the key factors of airplane devices. In order to enhance the quality of ESW, it becomes more important to introduce the reliable and efficient ESW validation tool. Currently, the validation of ESW is performed based on the target machines, the simulators of other related components and test programs. These different projects, whose hardware are identical, must config different test devices due to their software are not the same.To reduce the cost of test devices and tools, to improve the efficiency of the system validation, this article introduces a general-purpose system simulation test environment for ESW. QEMU, a open source Virtual Machine (VM), is employed to systematically simulate the tested target machine, to directly load, interpret and execute the identical binary code which is executed on the target machine. Via the virtualized target-machine interfaces and friendly UI test cases programming environment, it's feasible to perform the ESW system test without changing the target binary codes and reckoning on the target machine hardware environment.The benefit to introduce QEMU to our EWS test environment is that QEMU can simulate these popular X86, PPC and ARM, which are widely used in the embedded projects, on WINDOWS X86 platform. In order to easily and efficiently put it into practice, the solution consists of the target hardware simulation, the communication agent, and the test case programming environment. The target hardware simulation is the key part in this solution to directly execute the target binary codes without changes. The communication agent is designed to exchange the bi-direction communication data between the simulator and test cases execute environment. The test case programming environment is the tester interface to program test procedure and the execute them to validate the system behaviors, by which test engineers is able to only focus on the test data length and system response timing details.This article mainly completes the implementation of the target hardware simulator, by taking Data Transmission Processor (DTP) as example, and finally provides its functional test results.If projects share the same hardware architectures, test engineers may directly employ this simulator to perform the ESW system test. After a long time dry-running of this simulator, the test results confirm this simulator as a reliable and efficient solution, which satisfies the test requirement of ESW.