Raspberry Pi on Your PC (Linux or Windows)

QEMU – Emulating Raspberry Pi the easy way (Linux or Windows!)

15APR/12

This page will shows how to emulate an ARM1176JZF-S system the quick and easy way.

 

Assumptions

You have:

- QEMU - Linux or Windows. Make sure you have a suitable version (see 'Quick note on QEMU and ARM1176').

- A disk image for your distro of choice

• Raspian and Debian should work out of the box, however Arch Linux requires a few tweaks to work. These will not be explored in this article, as they can only be done in Linux.

- Ability to read and follow instructions carefully

 

Preparing the Environment

- Create and enter the work directory.

- Download the linux kernel:

wget http://xecdesign.com/downloads/linux-qemu/kernel-qemu

- Download and extract the disk image .img file to the working directory.

- All of the instructions will be carried out in this directory.

 

Check that you Have Everything

- Make sure you have kernel-qemu and your disk image files.

- qemu-system-arm -cpu ?

• The output should contain 'arm1176'. If not, make sure you follow the QEMU build tutorial (linux)  ordownload the correct binaries (windows).

If everything looks right, you should be ready to go.

 

First Boot

- qemu-system-arm -kernel kernel-qemu -cpu arm1176 -m 256 -M versatilepb -no-reboot -serial stdio -append "root=/dev/sda2 panic=1 rootfstype=ext4 rw init=/bin/bash" -hda 2013-09-25-wheezy-raspbian.img


• Windows users should use qemu-system-armw.exe instead of qemu-system-arm.
• Make sure you replace '2013-09-25-wheezy-raspbian.img' with the name of your disc image.
• Do not try to use more than 256 MB of RAM, the value is hard-coded in and QEMU will not work correctly.
• You should be presented with a minimal shell. From here, you will need to make some modifications before you can boot properly.

- nano /etc/ld.so.preload

- Put a # in front of the first line so that it looks like this:

#/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libcofi_rpi.so

- Press ctrl-x then y then enter to save and exit.

- (Optional) Use steps 2 to 4 above to create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/90-qemu.rules with the following content:

KERNEL=="sda", SYMLINK+="mmcblk0"
KERNEL=="sda?", SYMLINK+="mmcblk0p%n"
KERNEL=="sda2", SYMLINK+="root"

• The kernel sees the disk as /dev/sda, while a real pi sees /dev/mmcblk0. This will create symlinks to be more consistent with the real pi.

halt

First (proper) Boot

- qemu-system-arm -kernel kernel-qemu -cpu arm1176 -m 256 -M versatilepb -no-reboot -serial stdio -append "root=/dev/sda2 panic=1 rootfstype=ext4 rw" -hda 2013-09-25-wheezy-raspbian.img

• This is the same command as before, but without init=/bin/bash.
• This will take a while, but will be much quicker on subsequent boots.

That's it, you should see the system starting to boot.

 

Things to Keep in Mind

• The disc image will only contain about 200MB of free space (if any at all) for you to play with, so don't expect to be able to install a full system. You can use DD to expand the image and then resize manually, but that is not within the scope of this tutorial.
• You may see a few steps failing while the image boots. That's normal, since QEMU cannot emulate ALL of the hardware exactly. Double check that all the important steps are fine, but in general, this isn't something to worry about.

 

Acknowledgements

kinsa for figuring out the ld.so.preload business. Stevie-O for testing. Mjlally for finding a QEMU build that actually works on windows. v13 for a method to fix up ld.so.preload on windows.

 

For Troubleshooting Check:

http://xecdesign.com/qemu-emulating-raspberry-pi-the-easy-way/

Taken From: http://xecdesign.com/qemu-emulating-raspberry-pi-the-easy-way/