Building a Minimal ARMv7 Emulator from Scratch in Rust
By
xnacly
Crackling crust, pillowy middle. The kind of bagel that earns a second cup of coffee.
Summary
The article details the author's journey of building a minimal ARMv7 emulator called 'stinkarm' from scratch in Rust, with no external dependencies. The project aims to deeply understand ELF binary format parsing, ARM 32-bit instruction encoding, and assembly execution mechanics. The author explains the step-by-step process of creating the emulator, including parsing ELF headers, implementing ARM instruction decoding, handling memory management, and executing simple ARM assembly programs. The article serves as both a technical tutorial and personal learning experience, emphasizing the educational value of building low-level systems software without dependencies.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledTo fully understand everything: no dependencies. And of course Rust, since I already have enough C projects going on.
Emulating armv7 is surprisingly easy, even from scratch AND in Rust
Mostly to understand the ELF format, the encoding of arm 32bit instructions, the execution of arm assembly and how it all fits together
So I wrote the smallest binary I could think of: ARM assembly to execute this arm assembly on my x86 system, I need to: Parse the ELF
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