From Fedora Project Wiki

Description

Run Fedora ARM VM on your x86 machine via libvirt + QEMU.

Setup

Functioning Fedora virt host.

How to test

Get the media

This is one way to do it and the paths are only relevant for F33 Minimal media. For some more info, see: Architectures/ARM/F28/Installation#For_Versatile_Express_Emulation_with_QEMU

  • Download the latest arm disk image to $HOME:https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/33/Spins/armhfp/images/Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-33-1.2-sda.raw.xz
  • Extract the disk image: unxz Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-33-1.2-sda.raw.xz. Delete the original compressed image
  • Install virt-builder: sudo dnf install libguestfs-tools-c
  • Extract the kernel/initrd from the disk image: virt-get-kernel -a Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-33-1.2-sda.raw
  • Get kernel args for the the image virt-cat -a Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-33-1.2-sda.raw /etc/extlinux.conf
  • Copy the media to the the default libvirt image location: sudo mv Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-33-1.2-sda.raw vmlinuz-*.armv7hl initramfs-*.armv7hl.img /var/lib/libvirt/images/
  • Ensure qemu-system-arm is installed: sudo dnf install qemu-system-arm

Create the VM with virt-manager

  • Start virt-manager, connect to 'QEMU', click the 'New VM' icon
  • On the first page, under 'Architecture Options' select 'arm'. The 'virt-2.11' machine type needs to be selected for the VM to boot (BZ#1633328).
  • Select the 'Import install' option, go to the next page
  • Browse to the disk image, kernel, and initrd we moved in the previous step.
  • Use the output of the virt-cat command to set the kernel args or use the generic args: console=ttyAMA0 rw root=LABEL=_/ rootwait
  • Set the OS as Fedora 32.
  • Continue with the OS defaults, complete the install.
  • The guest should shortly start booting, and you should see text console output. After a bit of a wait, it should hit a text mode 'initial setup' where you can set a root password.

Create the VM with virt-install

Here's the relevant virt-install command:

sudo virt-install \
    --name Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-33-1.2-sda.raw --ram 4096 --arch armv7l --machine virt-2.11 --os-variant fedora31 --import \
    --disk /var/lib/libvirt/images/Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-33-1.2-sda.raw \
    --boot kernel=/var/lib/libvirt/images/vmlinuz-5.8.15-301.fc33.armv7hl,initrd=/var/lib/libvirt/images/initramfs-5.8.15-301.fc33.armv7hl.img,kernel_args="console=ttyAMA0 rw root=LABEL=_/ rootwait"

Expected Results

No obvious errors occur.