Application processors
So far weâve talked about microcontrollers, such as the Arm Cortex-M series. Now letâs try writing something for Cortex-A. For simplicity weâll just work with QEMUâs aarch64 âvirtâ board.
- Broadly speaking, microcontrollers donât have an MMU or multiple levels of privilege (exception levels on Arm CPUs, rings on x86), while application processors do.
- QEMU supports emulating various different machines or board models for each architecture. The âvirtâ board doesnât correspond to any particular real hardware, but is designed purely for virtual machines.