[Qemu-devel] Simulating 3 chips on one board

[Seth K]

I need to simulate 3 chips that are on one board and that talk to each
other through UART, SPI and GPIO. The chips verify each other's work, and I
need to be able to observe this communication for debugging. Can something
like this be done in QEMU?

My first thought was to create the chip then create a board/machine with 1
chip, and run 3 instances of QEMU on the host and have them talk to each
other via the host (/dev/uart7 for example) but that doesn't seem to be
possible. It seems QEMU cannot output 8 UARTS (I can't get more than 1) or
any GPIOs. Is that correct? Not sure about SPIs either.

My next thought was to make 1 board with all three chips, but have some way
to sniff the UARTs/SPIs/GPIOs between chips. Is that possible in QEMU?

Thank you!
Seth