May 152009
 

Here is the perfect explanation on how to setup a ARM linux emulator, there are only three things I change:

  • I installed binary qemu package instead of building from source
  • Those ARM kernels are now 2.6.18-6, guess version will be changed again later on
  • I didn’t install SSH – I’m using console for all the time (check below)

Pretty fun, and on my P4 2.8G Ubuntu it runs pretty smoothly- I guess it runs much more faster than most real ARM single board computers, but I don’t have anything to verify it.

Turning on console took me sometime, as I was lost on host and VM’s setting, actually it is pretty simple:

  • turn on ttyAMA0 in VM, I replaced tty2 with ttyAMA0 in /etc/inittab:
    2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 ttyAMA0
  • launch the VM without graphic (too much resource), and let VM use ttyAMA0 as console:
    qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-versatile -initrd initrd.img-2.6.18-6-versatile -hda hda.img -append “console=ttyAMA0 root=/dev/sda1” -serial stdio -nographic

Now after reboot, I have my ARM box now:

$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

It does not have full Ubuntu packages, I’m trying to do cross compiling (using GNAT) as I want to use Ada for all its development.

Once everything works I will get a dev board ๐Ÿ™‚

  One Response to “ARM emulator”

  1. BTW, I haven’t figured out how to shutdown the VM gracefully, I understand ACPI, etc are not supported so poweroff command doesn’t stop the VM completely, I have to launch another terminal to kill the process.

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