When reverse engineering an embedded system that is Linux based, one often wishes that they had an examplar system that could be virtualized, if only to gain familiarity with the nuances of the specific kernel version or to learn more about the running applications without needing the native hardware. Make no mistake, this is a bit of a pipe dream when working with bespoke embedded systems, but if you're working with a more generalized system (or if you just want to quickly spin up a Linux system to test against using QEMU) buildroot is a tool that can be used to generate images that will run in QEMU! The purpose of this post will be to describe how to build specific kernel images for QEMU using buildroot.

The Tricore CPU architecture is commonly found in automotive embedded systems, often running an RTOS or even just bare metal firmware. This post will go over setting up an entry level toolchain for the Tricore architecture under Linux, and how we can use this toolchain when reverse engineering automotive platforms. We will also go over and provide a very simple bare metal loader.