On Friday, November 12, 2021, <[email protected]> wrote:
Andrew, thanks for the links. I followed mostly the procedure of the DVD: https://blog.lazym.io/2021/04/16/Run-ARM-MIPS-Debian-on-QEMU/
Still, it took almost 2 hours until it was finished, that was after downloading the ISO. Host CPU load was rarely above 15%, and host disk access was almost absent. ISO version was as specified in the procedure, but further in the procedure is the wrong version (easy to correct).
Some notes: 1) I tested this on Fedora_35 with the latest qemu 6.1 release. 2) The procedure specified system-arm, that does not exists (anymore). I used aarch64. I specified 4G memory, 4 CPUs. 3. I did not do anything from that procedure regarding networking. Fedora has by default a bridge device setup, and it simply worked, looked fast too (not measured). I did see it going out during the install, and network detection and dhcp was very quick. 4. I did follow his procedure regarding the cdrom, but it is possible this later qemu version has a working cdrom device. TODO. 4. During the install near the end I was asked if I wanted to install some extra utilities, but it failed when I tried it. In the end, the qcow2 diskfile was 1.6G, quite small. 5. To extract the boot kernel and initrd I did not use sudo as specified with virt-copy-out, failed for some reason. Without sudo it was fine. His command virt-ls was nowhere to be found (not in the package manager), but during the install I noted the exact version numbers and used those. 6. After installation the system restarted itself, but because the qemu parameters were still those from the original start, it came back to the installer. I just killed it. 7. When starting the system with the supplied example (with adapted kernel/initrd numbers) and 4G memory, it starts fine to a cmd prompt. But networking does not work. Possibly it will if I use the same networking parameters as when doing the install. Even ifconfig was not there. 8. When using virt-manager, you can create a new VM (in virt-manager) from an existing OS image (the .qcow2 file in this case). But it boots an UEFI (and that doesn't react to kbd entries, likely because unlike a PC boot, it cannot setup kbd/mouse for this "virt" VM), and apparently the image is not set up for that. But it does generate a .xml file with lots of details, more than specified on the cmd line from the instructions. I suspect I can modify it to not use an UEFI firmware file and associated nvram file (this is how it works normally), but use directly the supplied kernel/initrd.
apparently aarch64-on-x86_64 shiuld be supported combination: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_Virt_AArch64_on_x86 but uefi on arm64 a bit too complicated for me, you might need to create empty 64mb file and feed it to qemu via -pflash..
So, quite nice so far. Networking next, else this is unusable for testing (the building of) an ARM version of CinGG. Is there no video-like device anywhere in this "virt" arm machine? Shouldn't one be able to have an "headless" Debian with a GUI terminal on the remote end (in this case the host)?
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/508362/running-an-x11-application-o... hopefully answers here will help you.. (we do not use kvm, but qemu-tcg, but because kvm usually use same qemu as hypervisor.. i hope it all applicable!)
MatN