Internships/ProjectIdeas/MultiCPUGDB

Multi-CPU cluster support for GDB server in QEMU

There are many examples in modern computing where multiple CPU clusters are grouped together in a single SoC. This is common in the ARM world especially. There are numerous examples such as ARM's big.LITTLE implementations and Xilinx's 4xA53s and 2xR5s on the ZynqMP SoC. The goal of this task is to add support to the GDB server to allow users to debug across these clusters.

Xilinx has an out of tree implementation that can be used as a starting point. Work will need to be done on top of this to prepare it for upstream submission and to ensure the implementation is more generic.

This will mostly involve extending GDB server to tell GDB about different architectures and then allow the user to swap between them.

The Xilinx implementation can be seen here: https://github.com/Xilinx/qemu/blob/master/gdbstub.c There has been some steps in preparing the work to go upstream, which can be seen here: https://github.com/Xilinx/qemu/tree/mainline/alistair/gdb

Details:

• Skill level: advanced
• Language: C
• Mentor: Alistair Francis <alistair23@gmail.com>, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <f4bug@amsat.org>
• Suggested by: Alistair Francis