What Will I Learn?
This tutorial is all about how to emulate R-Pi on Linux.
- You will learn how to emulate Raspberry-Pi on Linux.
- You will learn what is QEMU and how to download it.
Requirements
- Raspberry Pi running in Linux
- Ubuntu Linux knowledge
- Getting the Raspberry-Pi Image
- Installing QEMU emulator
- Compile or download a QEMU-Ready kernel of Raspberry-Pi
Difficulty
- Intermediate
Tutorial Contents
Getting the Raspberry-Pi Image
You can simply download the latest Raspbian Wheezy distribution from RaspberryPi.org.
QEMU
QEMU is short term for Quick Emulator . It is generic and open source machine emulator and it is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor that performs hardware virtualization (not to be confused with hardware-assisted virtualization).
You need to install QEMU on your Linux.
On Ubuntu terminal do:
$sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install qemu-system-x86
To check the correct installation, do as follow:
$qemu-system-arm --version
Get things going…
- So first of all create a working directory anywhere you like in your system.
- Copy your newly downloaded Raspberry Pi image to current directory and unzip it.
- Then rename it to rpi.img.
Download the QEMU-Ready R-Pi’s kernel
Download it from here
or you simply clone the git repository in the directory that you just created using the command below.
$git clone https://github.com/dhruvvyas90/qemu-rpi-kernel.git
Set-up Phase
- If you have done everything correctly your working folder should contain these files and folders.
- you need to make a simple script to make it easier to start the emulator. Open up your favorite text editor and save the content below as a new file and name it config
qemu-system-arm -kernel ./qemu-rpi-kernel/kernel-qemu -cpu arm1176 -m 256 -M versatilepb -no-reboot -serial stdio -append "root=/dev/sda2 panic=1 rootfstype=ext4 rw init=/bin/bash" -hda rpi.img
- After saving the file, make sure you make it executable by the command below:
$chmod +x config
- Now you are ready to start the raspberry pi in configuration mode. To do so, run the script you just created:
$./config
- If you have done everything correctly you will be greeted by terminal prompt of Raspberry Pi:
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