Z: AEMB QEMU

Here I am, on the third day of my internship at AESTE, typing away my thoughts and recollections from the past half-week. In the background, the whirring of the air-conditioning and fan accompanies Jason Mraz and James Morrison as they prescribe that everything will be fine (if it’s broken code then fix it)…

I arrived at AESTE on Wednesday feeling anxious (read: a little scared) because I was clear of my abilities. I wasn’t gonna try to fool anyone into thinking that I know more than I do, but I wasn’t gonna let myself use that excuse to under-perform as well. As opposed to the four months of attachment that the other interns get to enjoy, I have two because I’m returning to college (in America) at the end of August. This means that I hit the ground running. Run, Forrest, run!

My task is to port the AEMB to QEMU. AEMB, as you may well know, is the microprocessor brainchild of my supervisor. Life at AESTE revolves around the AEMB and everyone pitches in their 120% to make it great. QEMU, I newly learnt, is a processor emulator that can virtually emulate a full system on any host. The significance of my project lies in the fact that once the porting is complete, interested parties may test/run things on the virtual AEMB instead of having to have a physical core in their possession.

After three days of researching, debugging, and working long hours, I’ve laid the ground for the porting to happen. The trick was to replicate an existing architecture and to make the replica compile. Now that the replica finally compiles, there is a scaffold to stand on, and a piece of safe code to revert to in case I accidentally screw things up.

Next phase: turn the replica into a complete AEMB virtual machine!