Arm Virtual Hardware

Arm Virtual Hardware delivers test platforms for developers to verify and validate embedded and IoT applications during the complete software design cycle. Multiple modeling technologies are provided that remove the complexity of building and configuring board farms. This enables modern, agile, cloud native software development practices, such as continuous integration and continuous development CI/CD (DevOps) and MLOps workflows.

There are currently two families of Arm Virtual Hardware. Click the link, or scroll down, for info on how to get started.

• Arm Virtual Hardware Corstone uses Arm Fast Model technology to create virtual platforms in a cloud instance.
• Arm Virtual Hardware 3rd Party uses hypervisor technology to model real hardware provided by Arm’s partners.

Arm Virtual Hardware Corstone

A valid AWS account is necessary.

Arm Virtual Hardware (AVH) is available as an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) on AWS Marketplace . You can subscribe to the AMI, and launch in your AWS console. You can also locate it directly from the Images > AMIs section of your console, by searching for armvirtualhardware.

A c5.large instance type is recommended for AVH.

Information about launching an AWS instance is available in the Getting Started with AWS install guide.

Connect to instance terminal via SSH

On your local machine, run the following command to connect to the instance (with user name ubuntu) with SSH Key your_key.pem.

    

        
        
            ssh  -i <path_to>/your_key.pem ubuntu@<AMI_IP_address>
        
    

Verify instance has launched successfully

In your SSH terminal, run the tool-inventory.sh script to verify the instance has launched successfully, and component tools are available for use.

    

        
        
            ./tool-inventory.sh
        
    

Enable Code Server (Visual Studio Code)

To enabling access to Visual Studio Code with a web browser, you will need to start a SSH tunnel to the instance and forward port 8080.

    

        
        
            ssh -i <key.pem> -N -L 8080:localhost:8080 ubuntu@<AMI_IP_addr>
        
    

You can then access the IDE via a web browser on your local machine at:

    

        
        
            http://localhost:8080
        
    

Enable Virtual Network Computing (VNC)

In the AVH terminal, enable and set VNC password (you do not need to enter a view-only password when prompted):

    

        
        
            vncpasswd
        
    

Start the VNC server for the session:

    

        
        
            sudo systemctl start vncserver@1.service
        
    

On your local machine, forward port 5901.

    

        
        
            ssh -I <key.pem> -N –L 5901:localhost:5901 ubuntu@<AMI_IP_addr>
        
    

Connect your VNC client to port 5901. You will be prompted for the VNC password.

Example projects

A number of example projects are available to further help you get started.

Use of FVP_Corstone-1000

When using the supplied FVP_Corstone-1000, you must disable the Cryptocell component therein, else you will see a licensing error.

To do this, add the parameter se.cryptocell.DISABLE_DEVICE=1 to your launch command:

    

        
        
            FVP_Corstone-1000 -C se.cryptocell.DISABLE_DEVICE=1  ...
        
    

Arm Virtual Hardware 3rd Party

A valid Arm AVH account is required.

When you login to the AVH Dashboard you can create virtual devices based on a growing library of real devices and boards from Arm partners. Supported targets include:

• STMU5 IoT Discovery Kit
• Raspberry Pi 4
• i.MX 8M Plus
• i.MX 93

A selection of Quickstart Guides are provided to launch the platforms with ready made example images.