Is any ARM platform emulation in qemu functional enough to run ARM v7 code in multicore emulation mode?

Question

It seems like qemu ( atleast version 2.0.0 ) have issues with running U-boot and distros of Linux on ARMv7 boards in in case of vexpress-a9 and vespress-a15. Have anyone here succeeded runing multicore ARMv7 Operating System? If yes what was qemu release version? I mean run with

qemu -M someplatform -cpu cores=2 ...

Answer 1

qemu-system-arm -M virt -cpu cortex-a15

This setup worked just fine:

qemu-system-arm \
-M virt \
-append 'root=/dev/vda' \
-cpu cortex-a15 \
-drive file='rootfs.ext2.qcow2,if=virtio,format=qcow2' \
-kernel zImage \
-nographic \
-smp '2'

Then:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

gives:

processor       : 0
model name      : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
BogoMIPS        : 125.00
Features        : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0xc0f
CPU revision    : 1

processor       : 1
model name      : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
BogoMIPS        : 125.00
Features        : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0xc0f
CPU revision    : 1

I also bet it would work with -M vexpress-a15 -cpu cortex-a15 but I didn't test that. If you want to try it out, just copy exactly what Buildroot says, and it will work as usual.

Tested in QEMU 2.11.0, Linux v2.16, with this setup.