Can't Run Armbian Orange Pi One on QEMU

[FloatingSunfish]

I'm trying to run any standard Armbian image on QEMU on my Ubuntu machine, and I found this post on this forum.

 

I installed QEMU with:

 

    sudo apt-get install -y qemu

 

I downloaded "Armbian_20.08.1_Orangepione_buster_current_5.8.5.img" and copied the following files from the image file with PowerISO to a directory, "/myfolder":

 

    1. boot/vmlinuz-5.8.5-sunxi
    2. boot/initrd.img-5.8.5-sunxi
    3. boot/dtb-5.8.5-sunxi/sun4i-a10-cubieboard.dtb

 

I then ran QEMU with the below command:

 

    qemu-system-arm \
    -M cubieboard \
    -m 1024 \
    -cpu cortex-a8 \
    -dtb /myfolder/sun4i-a10-cubieboard.dtb \
    -kernel /myfolder/vmlinuz-5.8.5-sunxi \
    -initrd /myfolder/initrd.img-5.8.5-sunxi \
    -append 'earlyprintk loglevel=8 earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0x1c28000,115200n8 console=ttyS0 root=/dev/sda1' \
    -nographic \
    -serial stdio \
    -monitor none \
    -drive file=/myfolder/Armbian_20.08.1_Orangepione_buster_current_5.8.5.img,format=raw,if=none,id=d1 \
    -device ide-hd,drive=d1 \
    -nic user,model=allwinner-emac,hostfwd=tcp::50022-:22

 

However, I am getting the following error:

 

    [   12.122530] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill the idle task!
    [   13.448529] ---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill the idle task! ]---

 

Resizing the image does not seem to be required, but I also tried running qemu-img.exe resize -f raw Armbian_20.08.1_Orangepione_buster_current_5.8.5.img 2G and it did not help.

 

I figured I could try using the exact Armbian image that was used in the post linked above, but when I downloaded "Armbian_5.90_Orangepione_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.57.img" from the archives, the "/boot" directory of the .img file was empty.

 

Am I doing something wrong? And is there a place where I can download "/boot" files for "Armbian_5.90_Orangepione_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.57.img?"

[Werner]

Just curios. Why do you want to emulate?

[FloatingSunfish]

25 minutes ago, Werner said:

Just curios. Why do you want to emulate?

 

Hi!

 

We want to emulate because our devices with our development boards are not yet available.

It would be very handy if we can get QEMU to run Armbian images while waiting for these devices.

 

However, I will admit that there does not seem to be much information about this topic (old posts like the one linked in the OP no longer seem to work), so I understand if it takes a while to resolve this issue, if it's even resolvable at all.

[Werner]

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.

[FloatingSunfish]

@Werner

Indeed, we're also looking at emulating Ubuntu Core on a Raspberry Pi (probably with QEMU as well, unless we find a better Raspberry Pi emulator) due to how difficult it is to find information on this topic. 😅

Many thanks for the info, I'm sure it will be useful! 😉

 

Cheers!

[Werner]

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.

[FloatingSunfish]

@Werner

Ah, that's very helpful! 😄

Thank you!