Boot pi-gen generated image with QEMU aarch64

[Dlozitskiy]

Can someone provide tips on how to boot up a pi-gen generated image with QEMU?

I'm building the image for raspi4b, tried with and without USE_QEMU, however boot with qemu-system-aarch64 fails on mounting the root fs. The image works well with the device though, so something is missing in the way I run qemu-system-aarch64.

QEMU emulator version is 9.2.0

Here is my run command:

/usr/local/bin/qemu-system-aarch64 \
    -machine raspi4b \
    -cpu cortex-a72 \
    -smp 4 \
    -m 2G \
    -kernel kernel8.img \
    -append "root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 rw console=ttyAMA0,115200 loglevel=8 earlycon=pl011,0xfe201000 earlyprintk panic=1" \
    -drive format=raw,file=2025-02-04-raspios-bookworm-armhf-lite-qemu.img,if=sd \
    -nographic \
    -device usb-net,netdev=net0 \
    -netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::5022-:22

Tried both on Ubuntu and MacOS with the same result.

[    2.475523] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
[    2.476969] CPU: 3 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 6.6.74+rpt-rpi-v8 #1  Debian 1:6.6.74-1+rpt1
[    2.479543] Hardware name: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (DT)
[    2.481338] Call trace:
[    2.482583]  dump_backtrace+0xa0/0x100
[    2.483679]  show_stack+0x20/0x38
[    2.485203]  dump_stack_lvl+0x48/0x60
[    2.486026]  dump_stack+0x18/0x28
[    2.486883]  panic+0x330/0x398
[    2.487284]  mount_root_generic+0x260/0x348
[    2.488042]  mount_root+0x16c/0x2e8
[    2.488452]  prepare_namespace+0x74/0x2b8
[    2.490061]  kernel_init_freeable+0x374/0x3d8
[    2.491073]  kernel_init+0x2c/0x1f8
[    2.491694]  ret_from_fork+0x10/0x20
[    2.492673] SMP: stopping secondary CPUs
[    2.494232] Kernel Offset: disabled
[    2.494633] CPU features: 0x0,80000200,3c020000,0000421b

Tried different partitions /dev/mmcblk0p0-4 but that doesn't help.

[bjbcan]

I build the image with QEMU and am using the same version as you on an M1 Mac.

qemu-system-aarch64 \
    -M raspi3b \
    -cpu cortex-a72 \
    -append "rw earlyprintk loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0,115200 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=1" \
    -dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b-plus.dtb \
    -drive "if=sd,format=raw,file=$IMAGE_FILE"  \
    -kernel kernel8.img \
    -m 1G -smp 4 -nographic 

A less prescriptive version also works for me:

qemu-system-aarch64 \
	-m 1024 -M raspi3b -kernel kernel8.img \
	-dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b-plus.dtb -sd ${IMAGE_FILE} \
	-append "console=ttyAMA0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootwait rootfstype=ext4" \
	-nographic 

You can get the device tree blob file from any RPi image at /boot/firmware just like you got the kernel image. Note that I'm not able to get any network device configured as the QEMU installation I have doesn't have any nic models built in for RPis.

qemu-system-aarch64 -M raspi3b -nic model=help
Available NIC models for this configuration:
<blank>