[Qemu-devel] Allow ARMv7M to be started without a kernel

[Ben Leslie]

Hi all,

For some current software development I'm doing I've found it most easy
to use Qemu in the following manner

qemu-system-arm -M lm3s811evb  -s -S & arm-eabi-gdb

>From GDB I then load any code I want to debug and test and run it.

For this to work however, I needed to make a small change to armv7m.c
to enable starting the simulator without specifying a "-kernel" option.

Is there any reason why such a change is a bad idea? (If not, I'll
submit an appropriate patch).

FWIW, the reason why I'm not using -kernel is that the current
way the armv7m code works, it expects the provided kernel to
be a full flash image including appropriate vector table, whereas
right now I just want to debug some stand-alone code, not the full
system, which the above gdb approach works perfectly for.

Cheers,

Benno