This page attempts to document running NetBSD/riscv under the QEMU open source processor emulator. This can be extremely useful for development and testing.

Requirements

• qemu 6.2.0 (tested) or higher
• disk image
  • NetBSD current riscv64.img.gz
• kernel image
  • NetBSD current kernel

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 and kernel

The disk image (riscv64.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 netbsd-GENERIC64.gz 
$ gunzip riscv64.img.gz
$ qemu-img resize riscv64.img 20g

Booting the system (riscv64)

$ qemu-system-riscv64 \
      -M virt \
      -m 4g \
      -kernel netbsd-GENERIC64 \
      -drive if=none,file=riscv64.img,id=hd0,format=raw \
      -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
      -device virtio-rng-device \
      -netdev type=user,id=net0 \
      -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=00:11:22:33:44:55 \
      -append "root=dk1" \
      -nographic