The only thing it doesn’t have out of the box is graphics, but graphical programs on a fully emulated system run very slowly anyway so are best avoided. This is a purely virtual platform designed for use in virtual machines, and it supports PCI, virtio, a recent ARM CPU and large amounts of RAM. My recommendation is that if you don’t know for certain that you want a model of a specific device, you should choose the “virt” board. Many of QEMU’s models are annoyingly limited because the real hardware was also limited - there’s no PCI bus on most mobile devices, after all, and a fifteen year old development board wouldn’t have had a gigabyte of RAM on it. A kernel which is expecting to run on one system will likely not run on another. This wild profusion reflects a similar diversity in the real hardware world: ARM systems come in many different flavours with very different hardware components and capabilities. QEMU has models of nearly 50 different ARM boards, which makes it difficult for new users to pick one which is right for their purposes. Update : I have now written that post about installing a 64-bit ARM guest. (I may do a followup post for 64-bit ARM later.)
QEMU ARM EMULATOR HOW TO
There are a lot of older tutorials out there which suggest using boards like “versatilepb” or “vexpress-a9”, but these days “virt” is a far better choice for most people, so some documentation of how to use it seems overdue. In this post I’m going to describe how to set up Debian on QEMU emulating a 32-bit ARM “virt” board.