Running Linux in QEMU's aarch64 system emulation mode
Posted on Fri 09 May 2014 by alex in geek
Since I started working on aarch64 support for QEMU the most frequently asked question I got was "when can I run aarch64 system emulation on QEMU?". Well wait no more as support for a VIRT-IO based aarch64 board was recently merged into the master branch of QEMU. In this post I'll talk about building QEMU, a rootfs and a kernel that will allow you to start experimenting with the architecture.
Quick start
Let's first start with building and running QEMU with some pre-built images.
Build Dependancies
As has been noted in the comments the configure script will automatically enable features as long as the pre-requisite developer libraries are installed on your sytem. With a Debian/Ubuntu system this is easily achieved by running:
sudo apt-get build-dep qemu
Of course if you want to enable a feature (either a bleeding edge or non-standard) that requires additional libraries then you will need to install the appropriate development packages manually. The config.log file is usually a useful first step in working out what headers are being looked for.
Building QEMU
git clone git://git.qemu.org/qemu.git qemu.git cd qemu.git ./configure --target-list=aarch64-softmmu make
Assuming the build ran without any problems you should now have an executable ./aarch64-softmmu/qemu-system-aarch64 in your build directory. Grab a pre-built image from here and we'll check it works. The image is a kernel that has been combined with an initial RAM disk (initrd) with a basic root file-system. I go into more details on how to create this later on.
Be aware the command line is quite long so make sure you copy it all ;-)
wget http://people.linaro.org/~alex.bennee/images/aarch64-linux-3.15rc2-buildroot.img ./aarch64-softmmu/qemu-system-aarch64 -machine virt -cpu cortex-a57 -machine type=virt -nographic -smp 1 -m 2048 -kernel aarch64-linux-3.15rc2-buildroot.img --append "console=ttyAMA0"
If all went well you should see the familiar Linux boot sequence and eventually get a login prompt. Login as root (no password) and play in the new sandbox.
... usual kernel boot output ... Welcome to Buildroot buildroot login: root # uname -a Linux buildroot 3.15.0-rc2ajb-00069-g1aae31c #39 SMP Thu Apr 24 11:48:57 BST 2014 aarch64 GNU/Linux
Once you are done type C-a c to enter QEMU's monitor mode and then quit to exit.
QEMU 2.0.50 monitor - type 'help' for more information (qemu) quit
Accessing your local file-system
This is all very well but the test image only has a fairly limited root file-system attached to it. It will be a lot more useful if you could access your host file-system to test other binaries. Thanks to VIRT FS we can achieve this without too much hassle. Use the following extended QEMU command line:
./aarch64-softmmu/qemu-system-aarch64 -machine virt -cpu cortex-a57 -machine type=virt -nographic -smp 1 -m 2048 -kernel aarch64-linux-3.15rc2-buildroot.img --append "console=ttyAMA0" -fsdev local,id=r,path=/home/alex/lsrc/qemu/rootfs/trusty-core,security_model=none -device virtio-9p-device,fsdev=r,mount_tag=r
This sets up the selected path to be mountable by the guest. In this case I'm using an Ubuntu rootfs which can be downloaded from here. Once the system has booted the following commands on the guest will mount the local file-system:
Welcome to Buildroot buildroot login: root # mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio r /mnt # ls -l /mnt/ total 84 drwxr-xr-x 2 default default 4096 Apr 2 2014 bin drwxr-xr-x 2 default default 4096 Feb 27 2014 boot drwxr-xr-x 3 default default 4096 Apr 2 2014 dev drwxr-xr-x 64 default default 4096 Apr 3 2014 etc drwxr-xr-x 2 default default 4096 Feb 27 2014 home ..
Building your own rootfs
There are many solutions to this (including downloading Linaro engineering builds) but the simplest one I've found for rolling your own from scratch is the Buildroot project. It present the familiar kernel menuconfig interface and deals with all the hassle of setting up cross compilers for you.
git clone git://git.buildroot.net/buildroot buildroot.git cd buildroot.git make menuconfig
There are lots of configuration options to choose from but the following are what I use:
The last one will be important for when we build the kernel next. Once you have configured buildroot to your liking it's time to type make and leave it for a while as you enjoy a nice lunch ;-)
make .. lots of output ..
Building a kernel
For building the kernel I use my distro's aarch64 cross-compiler. On Debian/Ubuntu systems this is easily added with:
$ sudo apt-get install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu
And the usual kernel building process, with a few tweaks for cross compiling:
git clone https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git linux.git cd linux.git ARCH=arm64 make menuconfig
I've put my full config up here but important options to note are:
CONFIG_CROSS_COMPILE="aarch64-linux-gnu-" # needs to match your cross-compiler prefix CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE="/home/alex/lsrc/qemu/buildroot.git/output/images/rootfs.cpio" # points at your buildroot image CONFIG_NET_9P=y # needed for virtfs mount CONFIG_NET_9P_VIRTIO=y
Finally you build it all with:
ARCH=arm64 make -j 8
The -j 8 just specifies how many parallel build threads to use. Generally set it to the number of cores you have on your machine.
Final test
All that remains is to test that the newly built kernel works:
./aarch64-softmmu/qemu-system-aarch64 -machine virt -cpu cortex-a57 -machine type=virt -nographic -smp 1 -m 2048 -kernel ../linux.git/arch/arm64/boot/Image --append "console=ttyAMA0" ... lots more output ... Welcome to Buildroot ajbtest login: root [root@ajbtest ~]# ls -l total 0 [root@ajbtest ~]# uname -a Linux ajbtest 3.15.0-rc4ajb-00320-gafcf0a2-dirty #41 SMP Fri May 9 13:05:31 BST 2014 aarch64 GNU/Linux