This page attempts to document running NetBSD/evbarm under the QEMU open source processor emulator. This can be extremely useful for development and testing.
Requirements
- qemu 4.1.0 or higher
- disk image
- Tianocore EDK2 firmware
Installing QEMU on NetBSD
You can install latest qemu with the following commands. It is assumed that your pkgsrc tree is in /usr/pkgsrc directory.
# cd /usr/pkgsrc/emulators/qemu
# make install
Preparing the disk image
The disk image (armv7.img.gz or arm64.img.gz) must first be uncompressed. The qemu-img tool can then resize the image to the desired size. On first boot, NetBSD will grow the root file-system to match the size of the disk.
$ gunzip arm64.img.gz
$ qemu-img resize arm64.img 20g
Booting the system (arm64)
$ qemu-system-aarch64 -M virt -cpu cortex-a53 -smp 4 -m 4g \
-drive if=none,file=arm64.img,id=hd0 -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
-netdev type=user,id=net0 -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=00:11:22:33:44:55 \
-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -nographic
Booting the system (armv7)
$ qemu-system-arm -M virt -cpu cortex-a15 -smp 4 -m 2g \
-drive if=none,file=armv7.img,id=hd0 -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
-netdev type=user,id=net0 -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=00:11:22:33:44:55 \
-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -nographic
Enabling graphics support
To enable graphics support, remove the following command-line argument:
-nographic
and replace it with:
-display sdl,gl=on -device ramfb -device usb-ehci,id=ehci \
-device usb-mouse,bus=ehci.0 -device usb-kbd,bus=ehci.0
Bridged networking
To bridge a QEMU guest to your network, you need to create a tap(4) interface for your VM, then connect it to a physical interface with a bridge(4) interface.
The following example assumes NetBSD as a host OS, and a physical interface named bge0.
Then replace the -netdev part of the qemu command with:
-net nic -net tap,ifname=tap0,script=no