Emulating ARM64 on Linux

Over the last few years I’ve championed the ultra-low-power and high-density of a 64-bit ARM platform in the datacenter. The promise of thousands of cores all sipping power and taking up less room than the equivalent Intel architecture to me is both exciting and pragmatic as a large systems IT engineer.

Combining with the simplicity of a microservices architecture with the advantages of immutable infrastructure running across a sea-of-containers and you have an extremely agile development and operations platform.

Working for a semiconductor company specializing in ARM Architecture unfortuantely does not guarentee me access to this exciting new tech (yet), but through the wonders of emulation bringing up a development environment is just a few commands away.

The following gist contains the steps on standing up a emulated ARM64 virtual machine either with Ubuntu or Debian operating system. This should be enough for anyone wanting to tinker with an ARM64 before getting their hands on real hardware.

The biggest downside of this approach is while you can assign as much memory to QEMU as the host system has available, it is bound to only one CPU, which combined with the emulation environment leads to extremely slow performancen on CPU intensive tasks.

Setting up a Ubuntu 14.04 or Debian 8 (jessie) arm64 VM

This is mainly a notes dump and should be used for reference. This guide assumes:

• Ubuntu 14.04 (or Debian 8) hypervisor/host with bridge networking
• Knowledge of qemu
• Knowledge of debootstrap

Limitations of the qemu-system-aarch64 emulator on x86 include only being able to emulate one CPU and no KVM support.

Install required packages

sudo apt-get install debootstrap qemu-utils qemu

Install build deps for qemu (apt-src must be enabled in sources.list)

sudo apt-get build-dep qemu

Download the latest qemu source and build for a target of aarch64

git clone git://git.qemu.org/qemu.git qemu.git
cd qemu.git
./configure --target-list=aarch64-softmmu --enable-fdt --enable-vhost-net --enable-kvm
make -j4
sudo make install

Binary installs to

/usr/local/bin/qemu-system-aarch64

Create a 60GB qcow2 image that the VM will use as /

qemu-img create -f qcow2 /srv/chroots/trusty.qcow2 60G

Mount qcow as nbd device so we can use deboostrap on it and as a chroot later

modprobe -av nbd
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /srv/chroots/trusty.qcow2

Create partition on ndb0 and set the type to linux. Optionally you can also setup a swap partition.

fdisk /dev/nbd0

Create an ext4 filesystem on new partition

mkfs.ext4 /dev/nbd0p1

Mount partition on /mnt

mount -t ext4 /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt

Run first-stage debootstrap for arm64

debootstrap --arch=arm64 --keyring=/usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg --verbose --foreign trusty /mnt/

Copy arm64 qemu binary into chroot

cp /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static /mnt/usr/bin/

Go into chroot

chroot /mnt/ /bin/bash

Run second stage of debootstrap while in chroot

/debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage

Add trusty arm64 ports to sources.list to install kernel in chroot

deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty main universe multiverse restricted
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty-updates main universe multiverse restricted
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty-security main universe multiverse restricted
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty-proposed main universe multiverse restricted

deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty main universe multiverse restricted
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty-updates main universe multiverse restricted
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty-security main universe multiverse restricted
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty-proposed main universe multiverse restricted

If installing Debian Jessie, the steps are similar

qemu-img create -f qcow2 /srv/chroots/jessie.qcow2 60G
modprobe -av nbd
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /srv/chroots/jessie.qcow2
mkfs.ext4 /dev/nbd0p1
mount -t ext4 /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt
apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
apt-key add /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg
mkdir -p /mnt/usr/bin
cp /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static /mnt/usr/bin/
debootstrap  --arch=arm64 --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg  --exclude=debfoster jessie /mnt/ http://ftp.debian.org/debian
chroot /mnt/ /bin/bash

Add jessie arm64 ports to sources.list to install kernel in chroot

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main contrib non-free

deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main contrib non-free

Continue here for both Ubuntu and Debian

update apt sources

apt-get update

Install kernel and headers

• Ubuntu

  apt-get install linux-generic linux-headers-generic
  

• Debian

  apt-get install linux-image-arm64 linux-headers-arm64
  

Exit chroot

Copy linux kernel and initrd from chroot to /srv/chroots/ on hypervisor

cp /mnt/boot/vmlinux* /srv/chroots/
cp /mnt/boot/initrd* /srv/chroots/

Umount chroot

umount /mnt

Start up the VM in ro mode first without an initrd so we can get to a rescue shell to finish configuration

/usr/local/bin/qemu-system-aarch64 -cpu cortex-a57 -machine type=virt -nographic -smp 1 -m 8192 -kernel /srv/chroots/vmlinuz-3.13.0-34-generic -drive file=/srv/chroots/trusty.qcow2,if=none,id=blk -device virtio-blk-device,drive=blk -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=00:00:00:00:00:00 -netdev tap,id=net0 --append "root=/dev/vda1 ro console=ttyAMA0 --"

The boot will halt with an error about not being about to mount filesystems, choose continue to drop to a rescue shell and

remount / as rw
mount -o remount,rw /

Set hostname to something unique

hostname NEWHOSTNAME

Setup networking with DHCP

dhclient eth0

Setup a swap file so we don't run out of memory

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=4096
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

Install ssh and other packages

• Ubuntu

  apt-get install ssh openssh-server perl netcat netcat6 bind9utils dnsutils libio-socket-ssl-perl libnet-ssleay-perl ldap-utils libtime-modules-perl lsb sysv-rc-conf dkms linux-headers-generic make bzip2 git curl build-essential
  

• Debian

  apt-get install ssh openssh-server perl netcat netcat6 bind9utils dnsutils libio-socket-ssl-perl libnet-ssleay-perl ldap-utils libtime-modules-perl lsb sysv-rc-conf dkms linux-headers-arm64 make bzip2 git curl build-essential
  

Test sshd starts and enable on boot

sudo service ssh start
update-rc.d ssh defaults

Additional Configuration

• add swap to /etc/fstab if desired
• set root password and user if desired
• set networking to static if desired

halt VM

halt -p

Start VM with 8GB of memory, bridge networking, initrd, and rw / which will fully boot

/usr/local/bin/qemu-system-aarch64 -cpu cortex-a57 -machine type=virt -nographic -smp 1 -m 8192 -kernel /srv/chroots/vmlinuz-3.13.0-34-generic -initrd /srv/chroots/initrd.img-3.13.0-34-generic -drive file=/srv/chroots/trusty.qcow2,if=none,id=blk -device virtio-blk-device,drive=blk -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=00:00:00:00:00:00 -netdev tap,id=net0 --append "root=/dev/vda1 rw console=ttyAMA0 --"

Log in via ssh as root or user and use system normally

References

• http://www.bennee.com/~alex/blog/2014/05/09/running-linux-in-qemus-aarch64-system-emulation-mode/
• https://gmplib.org/~tege/qemu.html

http://www.ecliptik.com/Emulating-ARM64-on-Linux/