QEMU
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
- Install QEMU
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-system-aarch64
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.
- 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=QEMU_EFI.fd of=flash0.img conv=notrunc $ dd if=/dev/zero of=flash1.img bs=1M count=64
References
https://wiki.linaro.org/LEG/UEFIforQEMU http://blog.eciton.net/uefi