Emulate RPI with qemu

Why ?

Installing into memory card is slow, testing in VM is much faster and portable.

Download and unpack raspbian

wget http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2016-05-31/2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.zip

unzip 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.zip

Mount as loop device and extract kernel

sudo losetup -f --show -P 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img
/dev/loop32
sudo mkdir /mnt/rpi
sudo mount /dev/loop32p1 /mnt/rpi
cp /mnt/rpi/kernel7.img  .
cp /mnt/rpi/bcm2709-rpi-2-b.dtb .
sudo umount /mnt/rpi
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop32

Run

sudo qemu-system-arm \
    -M raspi2 \
    -append "rw earlyprintk loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0,115200 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2" \
    -cpu cortex-a7 \
    -dtb bcm2709-rpi-2-b.dtb \
    -sd 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img \
    -kernel kernel7.img \
    -m 1G \
    -smp 4 \
    -serial stdio

Work in progress

There are other examples of similar setup, but they use versatilepb and only 256MB of RAM, so not perfect.

TODO

Newer Qemu (i was using 2.11.1)
raspi3 machine type
Network setup

RPI
RPI