I’d like to run a Debian OS .iso image for ARM processors using QEMU in a host running Ubuntu (over an x86 architecture).
I executed the following line in a terminal:
aaron@aaron-HP-ZBook-14:~/Descargas$ qemu-system-arm -machine sabrelite -cdrom debian-10.7.0-arm64-netinst.iso -m 1024
But then, the following window appears.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/rB2PZ.png
I don’t know why Debian OS is not initiating after executing the previous line. Instead, a QEMU command line interface appears waiting for the user to enter some commands.
Thanks in advance!
Aarón.
2
Answers
Generally if you try to run qemu and only see the monitor there is likely something wrong with your image.
In this case you are attempting to boot "debian-netinst" which is the debian network-install image. If you want to emulate a debian-arm image I would recommend following this tutorial to get debian-arm up and running.
Here is a script that will automate the process in that tutorial
The script runs two QEMU commands. The first is a lengthy install process that should extract a debian initrd/kernel. The second QEMU command will boot the actual image. After the second command runs you should see the QEMU monitor open in a window. Use
ctrl+alt+(1 or 2)
to switch to the terminal/gui displayYou’re trying to boot a 64-bit Arm CDROM image on a board which is 32-bit only, so this is never going to work.
More generally, most Arm boards will not simply boot from a CDROM image passed via the -cdrom option, because they don’t have firmware/BIOS images which will run on QEMU and do the handling of booting from CD. Many boards don’t even have an IDE or SCSI interface that a CDROM drive could be plugged into!
You should decide whether you want (a) to boot an image on the sabrelite board, (b) to boot a 32-bit arm image, but you don’t care which board (c) to boot an arm64 kernel, and find a suitable tutorial or set of instructions accordingly. Lenna’s link is good for option (b); there’s a similar tutorial also for option (c). I don’t know of any sabrelite specific instructions.
It’s worth reading the QEMU documentation section on choosing an Arm board model — unless you have a strong reason why you want to use a particular board model and a kernel that you know works on that board model, then ‘virt’ is usually a better choice. Even ‘virt’ won’t boot directly off a cdrom, though, unless you also pass it a suitable UEFI bios image.