FloatingSunfish

You're welcome.
If you need to know in which ways Armbian differs to "vanilla" Debian or Ubuntu just take a look at the build script on Github: https://github.com/armbian/build
There - besides of the kernel sources and patches - you will find bsp packages and tweaks which are included or applied to each board individually depending on their family. For examples optimizations to increase sd cards lifetime or power consumtion.

Probably noone really tried to do such a thing . If you think about the boards price tag it is simply not worth wasting time to do emulation for testing.
If another community member has experience with this and is willing to help it is more than welcome. However from Armbians side there is probably noone that will take a look into due to general lack of ressources.
 
I dont know the specific reason for emulation to play with it beforehand but in general said Armbian is a Ubuntu or Debian OS, mostly unaltered, with a kernel package that will make it work on a particular board.
From userspace point of view there is little to know difference from having Debian as Armbian on a Board or Debian as - well - Debian ^^ on a PC or virtual machine. Binaries need to be armhf/arm64 or x86/amd64 of course but that's it. So maybe you can test whatever you wanna make run on your board with a x86 virtual machine as well.

Just curios. Why do you want to emulate?

The answer is a bit late, but it may be useful to someone else, because this page is the first in google for "armbian qemu".

Running image for orange-pi one - Armbian_5.90_Orangepione_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.57.7z:

Extrart Armbian image:
7z e Armbian_5.90_Orangepione_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.57.7z Armbian_5.90_Orangepione_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.57.img

Extract kernel, initrd and dtb:
7z e boot/vmlinuz-4.19.57-sunxi boot/initrd.img-4.19.57-sunxi boot/dtb-4.19.57-sunxi/sun4i-a10-cubieboard.dtb

Run qemu:
qemu-system-arm \
  -M cubieboard -m 1024 -cpu cortex-a8 -dtb sun4i-a10-cubieboard.dtb \
  -kernel vmlinuz-4.19.57-sunxi -initrd initrd.img-4.19.57-sunxi \
  -append 'earlyprintk loglevel=8 earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0x1c28000,115200n8 console=ttyS0 root=/dev/sda1' \
  -nographic -serial stdio -monitor none \
  -drive file=Armbian_5.90_Orangepione_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.57.img,format=raw,if=none,id=d1 \
  -device ide-hd,drive=d1 \
  -nic user,model=allwinner-emac,hostfwd=tcp::50022-:22
 
It was tested in qemu 3.1

Full caching is when CLEAN_LEVEL is blank.
 
 
This is not a professional support channel. Its a forum and this limit is that you think about before getting to excited asking for questions all over this place.  Pick a way at least to cover your part of support costs if you don't support R&D. https://forum.armbian.com/subscriptions/ If you choose perk for 500 EUR per month, then you can expect someone will be here all the time and will reply you within lets say one hour. If you choose less, you will become unrestricted user at once but you will still need to wait ... if you choose to give nothing back, where is the source of the rights to complain?

And this way we also get rid of those few % of the spam that penetrate automatic defence.

We build entire system and support packages in chroot environment. I don't see any reasons why this won't work. Did you at least tried it once? Make sure to check CLEAN_LEVEL to disable kernel rebuilding - everything else is cached. But when you are changing package structure, cache will be rebuild  since its tied to the package list.