Architectures/AArch64/Booting a QEMU image

Booting AArch64 using UEFI in a QEMU/KVM VM

Setting up the host

Richard WM Jones has written an excellent post on booting a Fedora 21 aarch64 UEFI guest on x86_64. This can be reproduced on an F21 x86_64 host using existing packages, but as Richard mentioned, newer versions of some packages are required. Using an updated F22 host now provides all the necessary package versions.

First get virt-builder, in order to make an F22 AArch64 image for QEMU (if not already installed):

$ sudo yum -y install libguestfs-tools-c

Install the latest version of QEMU:

$ sudo yum update qemu-system-aarch64

The latest version of AAVMF should be installed to run an aarch64 image. AAVMF is not in an official Fedora package yet, but Gerd has provided an RPM package for installation convenience. Download his repo definition and install his latest build of edk2:

(cd /etc/yum.repos.d; sudo curl -O https://www.kraxel.org/repos/firmware.repo )
sudo yum -y install edk2.git-aarch64

Making the Image

Note
There is a bug regarding fallback.efi [BZ#1190191], so use a pre-built NVRAM file to work around it.

curl -O http://libguestfs.org/download/builder/fedora-22-aarch64-nvram.xz
unxz fedora-22-aarch64-nvram.xz

Note
By default, a randomly generated root password will be assigned. Make note of the root password in the virt-builder output, so you can log in later. Optionally, a root password may be set when building an image. In this example a password will be set.

Use virt-builder to make an F22 image file:

virt-builder \
  --arch aarch64 \
  --root-password password:fedora \
    fedora-22

A script may be set up to start the VM:

cat > run-qemu.sh << EOF
#!/bin/bash

VERSION=22

qemu-system-aarch64 \\
    -nodefconfig \\
    -nodefaults \\
    -display none \\
    -M virt -cpu cortex-a57 -machine accel=tcg \\
    -m 2048 \\
    -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=/usr/share/edk2.git/aarch64/QEMU_EFI-pflash.raw,readonly \\
    -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=fedora-\${VERSION}-aarch64-nvram \\
    -drive file=fedora-\${VERSION}.img,format=raw,if=none,id=hd0 \\
    -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \\
    -netdev user,id=usernet -device virtio-net-device,netdev=usernet \\
    -serial stdio
EOF

chmod +x run-qemu.sh

Booting the image

Run the script (or the command it contains) to boot the VM.

./run-qemu.sh

This should boot grub2 and automatically boot the Fedora 22 kernel.