[Pkg-raspi-maintainers] Running linux-image-rpi on QEMU

[Giovanni Mascellani]

Hello Raspberry Pi Debianers!

In order to make experimentation and bugfixing with random architectures
easier in Debian, I created DQIB (Debian Quick Image Baker). It is
basically a bunch of scripts that automatically create Debian images
that can be run with QEMU: if you want to play with Debian on
architecture X, ideally you can just download the latest images built by
DQIB for X and run it with QEMU using the provided command line. For
more reasons behind the project, see [1].

 [1] https://www.giovannimascellani.eu/dqib-debian-quick-image-baker.html

DQIB seems to work well on many architectures, but I could not make it
work on armel. I can create an armel image, but I don't know how to
properly load it with QEMU. I have noticed that Debian repositories
contain a kernel package linux-image-rpi targeted at Raspberry Pis, and
QEMU seems to support Raspberry Pi 2 emulation (the command
"qemu-system-arm -machine help" returns "raspi2" as one of the machines
available on ARM).

Unfortunately, I could not make it work. So maybe here there could be
someone who knows about this: do you know of how to boot the kernel from
linux-image-rpi on QEMU? Which command line arguments or tricks or
whatever is needed?

My current pre-baked images are available at [2] (see the "armel-raspi2"
variant). It is basically a file system built with mmdebstrap, with
linux-image-rpi installed and written in a qcow2 hard disk. But the QEMU
command line in the archive does not work.

 [2] https://people.debian.org/~gio/dqib/

Thanks, Giovanni.
-- 
Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani at gmail.com>
Postdoc researcher - Université Libre de Bruxelles