How to emulate the Raspberry Pi 2 on QEMU?

Question

Some time ago I emulated the Raspberry Pi following this article, but this approach has several problems:

1. It is very slow.
2. The display solution is limited to 800x600.
3. You cannot emulate more than 256mb ram.

Furthermore there is no emulation for the new Broadcom BCM2836 or any other arm7 based cpu in Qemu. However, there are several reasons, why it would be interesting to emulate the Raspberry Pi. So I am interested in any hints that push me in the right direction to get a working Raspberry Pi 2 emulation using Qemu or any other emulation software under Linux.

Answer 1

If you're comfortable building qemu, you can find support for pi2 system emulation here: https://github.com/0xabu/qemu. It's not particularly speedy, and the device emulations are incomplete, but you can resize the RAM and framebuffer.

There are brief instructions for booting Raspbian at the end of https://github.com/0xabu/qemu/wiki

Answer 2

If you want to run a Raspberry Pi 2 build bot or something similar you should take a look at running Qemu in user/static mode. I tried this using Linux in a virtual machine, it's quite fast compared to Qemu system emulation. Unfortunately it only emulates the CPU so you won't be able to test games or Wayland/Weston.

I was able to build a kernel for my Pi 2 in roughly a hour using this method.

Answer 3

Ubuntu 16.04, QEMU 2.9.0 -M raspi2, Raspbian 2016-05-27, vanilla kernel

1. Compile QEMU 2.9.0 from source:

   sudo apt-get build-dep qemu-system-arm
   git clone --recursive git://git.qemu-project.org/qemu.git
   cd qemu
   git checkout v2.9.0
   ./configure
   make `nproc`
   

2. Download image and extract the kernel and dts from it:

   1. Download the image and unzip it:

      wget http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2016-05-31/2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.zip
      unzip 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.zip
      

   2. Mount the second image of the partition. The easiest way is:

      sudo losetup -f --show -P 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img
      

      This only works with latest losetup on Ubuntu 16.04, other methods at: https://askubuntu.com/questions/69363/mount-single-partition-from-image-of-entire-disk-device/496576#496576

      This prints a loop device, e.g.:

      /dev/loop0
      

      so we do:

      sudo mkdir /mnt/rpi
      sudo mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt/rpi
      cp /mnt/rpi/kernel7.img bcm2709-rpi-2-b.dtb .
      sudo umount /mnt/rpi
      sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0
      

3. Run:

   ./arm-softmmu/qemu-system-arm \
       -M raspi2 \
       -append "rw earlyprintk loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0,115200 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2" \
       -cpu arm1176 \
       -dtb bcm2709-rpi-2-b.dtb \
       -sd 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img \
       -kernel kernel7.img \
       -m 1G \
       -smp 4 \
       -serial stdio \
   ;
   

You can then login on the terminal that shows on your host terminal.

Current limitations:

• -M raspi2 was added in QEMU 2.6.0, and Ubuntu 16.04 only has QEMU 2.5.0, so we have to compile QEMU from source. But this is not hard.
• the GUI shows but is not responding to the mouse / keyboard, tested on both SDL and VNC. But CLI works perfectly however. So you might as well use the Lite image which has go GUI for now.
• no networking

Ubuntu 16.04, QEMU 2.5.0, Raspbian 2016-05-27, modified kernel

This method uses -M versatilepb which is present on the QEMU 2.5.0 of Ubuntu 16.04.

The downside is that you have to download a modified kernel (see https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/47124/emulating-with-qemu-why-the-extra-kernel), and modify the image, so it is less representative of the real system.

1. Download: https://github.com/dhruvvyas90/qemu-rpi-kernel/blob/36ede073f4ccb64f60200ede36c231afe9502070/kernel-qemu-4.4.12-jessie

   We pick 4.4.12 since that is the kernel version in the Raspbian image.

   The process to generate that kernel blob is described at in the repository at: https://github.com/dhruvvyas90/qemu-rpi-kernel/tree/36ede073f4ccb64f60200ede36c231afe9502070/tools

   Why this extra kernel image is needed: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/47124/emulating-with-qemu-why-the-extra-kernel

2. Modify the Raspbian image as mentioned at: https://github.com/dhruvvyas90/qemu-rpi-kernel/wiki/Emulating-Jessie-image-with-4.x.xx-kernel/0068f0c21d942b0f331e18014ff8e22c20cada5c

   Summary:

   1. Mount the image just as we did for the -M raspi2, but use the second partition instead of the first:

      sudo mount /dev/loop0p2 /mnt/rpi
      

   2. Edit the image:

      # Comment out the line present there with #
      sudo vim /mnt/rpi/etc/ld.so.preload
      # Comment out the lines of type: "/dev/mmcblk*"
      sudo vim /mnt/rpi/etc/fstab
      

3. Run:

   sudo apt-get install qemu-system-arm
   qemu-system-arm \
       -kernel kernel-qemu-4.4.12-jessie \
       -cpu arm1176 \
       -m 256 \
       -M versatilepb \
       -no-reboot \
       -serial stdio \
       -append "root=/dev/sda2 panic=1 rootfstype=ext4 rw" \
       -hda 2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img
   

[failed] Ubuntu 17.04, QEMU 2.8.0 -M raspi2, Raspbian 2016-05-27, vanilla kernel

On this newer Ubuntu, QEMU 2.8.0 is the default, so we don't need to compile QEMU from source for -M raspi2. However, 2.8.0 hangs on boot after the message:

Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 100x30

This goes to show how unstable -M raspi2 still is.

[failed] Ubuntu 16.04, QEMU 2.9.0 -M raspi2, Raspbian 2017-08-16, vanilla kernel

On this newer image, using the same method for 2016-05-27, the kernel panics at boot with:

Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
...
[    4.138114] ---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

TODO: sschoof mentions that rootdelay=1 solves this, I have to try it out.

bztsrc/raspi3-tutorial RPI3 bare metal on QEMU

https://github.com/bztsrc/raspi3-tutorial is a good set of examples that just work on QEMU, ultraquick getting started at: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/34733/how-to-do-qemu-emulation-for-bare-metal-raspberry-pi-images/85135#85135