QEMU Raspberry Pi 3b virtualization

Instructions

Before you start download the *-arm64.img.xz image for the RPI3b from the raspiberry pi website

• First, download the image Aarch64 imge from the Raspberry website, or any other desired architecture of any kind.

• unzip the .img.xz file with :

  unxz *.img.xz

• then, create a directory that is of offset equal to sectors*Device's Start offset

  run the following to get the information of sectors and start offset:

  fdisk -l *.img

  mkdir <directory-name>

  sudo mount -v -o offset=$((sectors_No*Start_Offset)) *.img <directory-name>

• After the image is mounter on the host machine, copy the desired .dtb along with the kernel*.mg file

  
  

• To enable ssh, inside the directory of the image/kernel run the command:

  sudo touch ssh

  cd ..

  sudo umount <directory-name>

• Resize the image the raw image to the desired file-size

  qemu-img resize -f raw *.img *G

  *G stands for desired image storage. Change * with desired number, e.g. 8G)

  
  - Finally run the ./startpi.sh script to run the virtual machine.
  - Check the flags bellow and modify the script.
  

• Connect via ssh from host machine with command:

  ssh -p 2022 user@localhost

| qemu flags: |

• machine -> name of the machine
• cpu -> name of architecture
• smp -> symmetric multiprocessing, aka give number of CPU Cores
• m -> RAM, default is 128MiB
• kernel -> kernel directory (extracted from .img file). ARM-only prerequisite
• dtb -> device-tree binary (ARM-only prerequisite)
• sd -> SecureDigital card image (.img file)
• append use cmdline as kernel command line

---

qemu-system-aarch64 -machine raspi3b -cpu cortex-a53 -smp 4 -m 1G -kernel kernel8.img \
 -dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb -sd 2023-02-21-raspios-bullseye-arm64-lite.img \
 -append "root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootwait rootfstype=ext4" \
 -usbdevice keyboard -usbdevice mouse -device usb-net,netdev=net0\
 -netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2022-:22