QEMU

Revision 12 as of 2016-01-08 22:27:08

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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 and the EFI image for QEMU: 
     $ sudo apt-get install qemu-system-arm qemu-efi
  2. Now you'll need to create pflash volumes for UEFI. Two volumes are required, one static one for the UEFI firmware, and another dynamic one to store variables. Both need to be exactly 64M in size. 
     $ dd if=/dev/zero of=flash0.img bs=1M count=64
 $ dd if=/usr/share/qemu-efi/QEMU_EFI.fd of=flash0.img conv=notrunc
 $ dd if=/dev/zero of=flash1.img bs=1M count=64

  3. Now you should be able to boot/ into a -arm64-uefi1.img type cloud image.

    1. For accelerated VMs (arm64 host w/ KVM support) 
        $ sudo qemu-system-aarch64 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -cpu host -M virt -nographic -pflash flash0.img -pflash flash1.img -drive if=none,file=vivid-server-cloudimg-arm64-uefi1.img,id=hd0 -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 -netdev type=tap,id=net0 -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=$randmac

      Note: For GICv3 systems, such as Cavium ThunderX, you must use QEMU from Ubuntu 16.04 or newer, and pass "-M virt,gic_version=3". Additionally, you must use a 15.10 (wily) or newer cloud image for guests.

    2. For emulated VMs (e.g. x86 host) 
        $ sudo qemu-system-aarch64 -m 1024 -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt -nographic -pflash flash0.img -pflash flash1.img -drive if=none,file=vivid-server-cloudimg-arm64-uefi1.img,id=hd0 -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 -netdev type=tap,id=net0 -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=$randmac

References