Arm System emulator
QEMU can emulate both 32-bit and 64-bit Arm CPUs. Use the
qemu-system-aarch64
executable to simulate a 64-bit Arm machine.
You can use either qemu-system-arm
or qemu-system-aarch64
to simulate a 32-bit Arm machine: in general, command lines that
work for qemu-system-arm
will behave the same when used with
qemu-system-aarch64
.
QEMU has generally good support for Arm guests. It has support for nearly fifty different machines. The reason we support so many is that Arm hardware is much more widely varying than x86 hardware. Arm CPUs are generally built into “system-on-chip” (SoC) designs created by many different companies with different devices, and these SoCs are then built into machines which can vary still further even if they use the same SoC. Even with fifty boards QEMU does not cover more than a small fraction of the Arm hardware ecosystem.
The situation for 64-bit Arm is fairly similar, except that we don’t implement so many different machines.
As well as the more common “A-profile” CPUs (which have MMUs and will
run Linux) QEMU also supports “M-profile” CPUs such as the Cortex-M0,
Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M33 (which are microcontrollers used in very
embedded boards). For most boards the CPU type is fixed (matching what
the hardware has), so typically you don’t need to specify the CPU type
by hand, except for special cases like the virt
board.
Choosing a board model
For QEMU’s Arm system emulation, you must specify which board
model you want to use with the -M
or --machine
option;
there is no default.
Because Arm systems differ so much and in fundamental ways, typically operating system or firmware images intended to run on one machine will not run at all on any other. This is often surprising for new users who are used to the x86 world where every system looks like a standard PC. (Once the kernel has booted, most userspace software cares much less about the detail of the hardware.)
If you already have a system image or a kernel that works on hardware
and you want to boot with QEMU, check whether QEMU lists that machine
in its -machine help
output. If it is listed, then you can probably
use that board model. If it is not listed, then unfortunately your image
will almost certainly not boot on QEMU. (You might be able to
extract the filesystem and use that with a different kernel which
boots on a system that QEMU does emulate.)
If you don’t care about reproducing the idiosyncrasies of a particular
bit of hardware, such as small amount of RAM, no PCI or other hard
disk, etc., and just want to run Linux, the best option is to use the
virt
board. This is a platform which doesn’t correspond to any
real hardware and is designed for use in virtual machines. You’ll
need to compile Linux with a suitable configuration for running on
the virt
board. virt
supports PCI, virtio, recent CPUs and
large amounts of RAM. It also supports 64-bit CPUs.
Board-specific documentation
Unfortunately many of the Arm boards QEMU supports are currently
undocumented; you can get a complete list by running
qemu-system-aarch64 --machine help
.
- Arm Integrator/CP (
integratorcp
) - Arm MPS2 and MPS3 boards (
mps2-an385
,mps2-an386
,mps2-an500
,mps2-an505
,mps2-an511
,mps2-an521
,mps3-an524
,mps3-an547
) - Arm Musca boards (
musca-a
,musca-b1
) - Arm Realview boards (
realview-eb
,realview-eb-mpcore
,realview-pb-a8
,realview-pbx-a9
) - Arm Server Base System Architecture Reference board (
sbsa-ref
) - Arm Versatile boards (
versatileab
,versatilepb
) - Arm Versatile Express boards (
vexpress-a9
,vexpress-a15
) - Aspeed family boards (
*-bmc
,ast2500-evb
,ast2600-evb
) - Aspeed minibmc family boards (
ast1030-evb
) - Facebook Yosemite v3.5 Platform and CraterLake Server (
fby35
) - Boundary Devices SABRE Lite (
sabrelite
) - Canon A1100 (
canon-a1100
) - Cubietech Cubieboard (
cubieboard
) - Emcraft SmartFusion2 SOM kit (
emcraft-sf2
) - Calxeda Highbank and Midway (
highbank
,midway
) - Freecom MusicPal (
musicpal
) - Gumstix Connex and Verdex (
connex
,verdex
) - Intel Mainstone II board (
mainstone
) - Kyoto Microcomputer KZM-ARM11-01 (
kzm
) - Nordic nRF boards (
microbit
) - Nokia N800 and N810 tablets (
n800
,n810
) - Nuvoton iBMC boards (
*-bmc
,npcm750-evb
,quanta-gsj
) - NXP i.MX25 PDK board (
imx25-pdk
) - Orange Pi PC (
orangepi-pc
) - Palm Tungsten|E PDA (
cheetah
) - Raspberry Pi boards (
raspi0
,raspi1ap
,raspi2b
,raspi3ap
,raspi3b
) - Sharp XScale-based PDA models (
akita
,borzoi
,spitz
,terrier
,tosa
) - Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 (
collie
) - Siemens SX1 (
sx1
,sx1-v1
) - Stellaris boards (
lm3s6965evb
,lm3s811evb
) - STMicroelectronics STM32 boards (
netduino2
,netduinoplus2
,stm32vldiscovery
) - ‘virt’ generic virtual platform (
virt
) - Xilinx Versal Virt (
xlnx-versal-virt
)