Running Debian on a QEMU emulated arm machine

Here are the steps I followed to play with QEMU to get myself acquainted with it. My host is Ubuntu 20.04.1.

1. Building QEMU

There are several ways to download and build QEMU. You can install the pre-packaged version on Ubuntu with apt or download and build the latest release from the QEMU website.

But to have the latest release and stay up to date, you can clone the git repository which is the way I'm doing.

Install the required additional packages as instructed here. I also installed the recommended additional packaged as well.

sudo apt-get install git libglib2.0-dev libfdt-dev libpixman-1-dev zlib1g-dev ninja-build

Clone the source code:

git clone git://git.qemu-project.org/qemu.git

Initialize and update the submodules.

cd qemu
git submodule init
git submodule update --recursive

Create a new build directory:

mkdir build
cd build

Configure and build. If you want to build for a specific target(s) only which is faster, just add a --target-list option. Run ../configure --help to see the list of available targets and other configuration options.

../configure
../configure --target-list=arm-softmmu

Build and if necessary, test which takes a lot of time.

make
make check
make install

2. Installing Debian

Download the arm disk image from Debian or using wget from the server as shown below. It's the current version of Debian that will run on ARM machines. At the time of this post, the current version was codenamed bullseye.

wget http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/mini.iso

Download also the vmlinux kernel and initrd.gz initramfs.

wget http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/arm64/initrd.gz
wget http://ftp.debian.org/dget http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/mini.iebian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/arm64/linux

There are 3 different arm ports available: arm64, armhf and armel which are explained here in detail. Basically, armel (arm EABI) is for older architecture versions (4T, 5T and 6), armhf (arm hard float) is for floating point support and arm64 for 64-bit ARMv8 architecture which I'll use.

qemu-system- executables built in the previous step are for simulating different machines. qemu-system-aarch64 will simulate arm64 machine.
The version used here is as shown below.

$ qemu-system-aarch64 --version
QEMU emulator version 7.1.93 (v7.2.0-rc3)
Copyright (c) 2003-2022 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developersurl

Create a hard disk image for our system by running qemu-img command. qcow2 (QEMU copy on write) is a disk image file format native to the QEMU.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 debian-arm.sda.qcow2 5G

Start the installation process:

../qemu/build/qemu-system-aarch64 -M virt -cpu cortex-a53 -m 1G -kernel ./linux -initrd ./initrd.gz -hda debian-arm.sda.qcow2 -append "console=ttyAMA0" -drive file=./mini.iso,id=cdrom,if=none,media=cdrom -device virtio-scsi-device -device scsi-cd,drive=cdrom -nographic

After a few seconds, the kernel boots and Debian installer will start. You can just jump through the screens to configure your language, location, locale, keymap etc.

But I encountered a network set-up problem and therefore couldn't access the Debian archive mirror. I'll look into it and post again.

Small tip: I didn't know how to exit the installer. Going back and choosing "Aborting the installer" option only reboot and restarted the installer. Instead you can choose "Execute a shell" and then type poweroff.

Update

After a bit of research, it looks like setting up network on Debian is tricky. It could be a missing device driver/firmware since most of the firmware images are non-free, they are not included in the official Debian installation images. Unofficial images including non-free firmware are available, but there were none available for arm.

Therefore I decided to use the DVD image that doesn't require network during the installation. I loosely followed the instructions this blog.

Again, download the necessary files.

  curl -O http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/cdrom/initrd.gz
  curl -O http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/cdrom/vmlinuz
  curl -O -L https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/arm64/iso-dvd/debian-11.6.0-arm64-DVD-1.iso

Boot the VM to install Debian.
debian-arm.sda.qcow2

qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4G -machine type=virt -cpu cortex-a53 -initrd "./initrd.gz" \
  -kernel "./vmlinuz" -append "console=ttyAMA0" \
  -drive file="./debian-11.6.0-arm64-DVD-1.iso", id=cdrom,if=none,media=cdrom \
    -device virtio-scsi-device \
    -device scsi-cd,drive=cdrom \
  -drive file="./debian-arm.sda.qcow2", id=hd,if=none,media=disk \
    -device virtio-scsi-device \
    -device scsi-hd,drive=hd \
  -nographic

The network setup will fail again, but you can choose Do not configure the network at this time and the installation will run smoothly after that.

When prompted about the bootloader, you can just choose Continue.

After installation finishes, don't click on the Continue because it'll start the installer all over again. Rather, choose Go back, Execute a shell and then type poweroff.