Emulating Raspberry Pi 4 with QEMU?

Question

I want to emulate Raspberry Pi 4 using QEMU, but I am not able to find any image for RPi4. I need a kernel with which QEMU can emulate a Cortex-A72.

Answer 1

QEMU does not have a model of the raspberry pi 4 at this time (only the 0, 1ap, 2b, 3ap and 3b). If some other machine type that QEMU does support would be good enough for you you could build a kernel for that machine type and use that. (For instance, for a lot of people all they really want is "boots a 64-bit Linux userspace" and they don't need it to really exactly match the Raspberry Pi board hardware; for those people the 'virt' board is usually a good choice.)

Whatever you do, you need to make sure that the machine type you ask QEMU to emulate matches the machine type you've built the kernel for -- if you try to boot a kernel on a board that it does not support it will not work.

Answer 2

I just boot raspios bullseye on a x86 ubuntu laptop, it can show the desktop, can be login in. But it's very slow.

qemu-system-aarch64 -M virt,highmem=off -smp 8 -m 2G -cpu cortex-a72 -kernel linux-stable/arch/arm64/boot/Image -append root=PARTUUID=d97f5830-02 rw console=ttyAMA0 -serial telnet:localhost:4321,server,nowait -monitor telnet:localhost:4322,server,nowait -device VGA,id=vga1 -device secondary-vga,id=vga2 -object iothread,id=io1 -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=disk0,iothread=io1 -drive data/images/2022-01-28-raspios-bullseye-arm64.img

I build the kernel image follow this guide.

https://github.com/anholt/linux/wiki/Raspberry-Pi-development-environment#building-the-Kernel

Of course, as the raspios is emulated on the x86 laptop, it's definitely slow. So, if you can virtualize it on an arm64 host, you can use the accelerator like kvm, hvf etc.

    qemu-system-aarch64 \
      -M virt,highmem=off,accel=hvf \
      -cpu host \
      -m 1G \
      -smp 4 \
      -kernel $KERNEL_IMAGE_PATH -append "root=/dev/vda2 rw console=ttyAMA0" \
      -netdev user,id=n1,ipv6=off,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:22 -device e1000,netdev=n1 \
      -hda data/images/2022-01-28-raspios-bullseye-arm64.img \
      -serial telnet:localhost:4321,server,nowait \
      -monitor telnet:localhost:4322,server,nowait \
      -device VGA,id=vga2 \
      -drive file=data/images/2021-10-30-raspios-bullseye-armhf.img,if=virtio

Answer 3

there is a patch here if you want. You can compile qemu with raspi4b2g (Patch not from me)

https://github.com/0xMirasio/qemu-patch-raspberry4.git

Answer 4

or try the following branch (2019), which may or maynot be patch equivalent to that already mentioned: https://gitlab.com/philmd/qemu/-/tree/raspi4_wip