Ubuntu/arm64 can run inside the QEMU emulator. You can either do this fully emulated (e.g. on an x86 host) or, accelerated w/ KVM if you have an arm64 host. This page describes how to do both.

I've chosen to describe a UEFI-based system here so I can make use of the kernel on the guest's disk image. It is possible to boot directly into Linux instead.

Note: this requires Ubuntu 15.04 or greater

Getting the bits

1. Install QEMU

    $ sudo apt-get install qemu-system-aarch64

2. Get a tianocore UEFI image. Eventually Ubuntu should provide this in a package called qemu-efi (there's one currently in Debian's NEW queue), but for now you can download one from Linaro.

3. Now you'll need to create plflash

References

https://wiki.linaro.org/LEG/UEFIforQEMU http://blog.eciton.net/uefi