.. _ARM-System-emulator: Arm System emulator ------------------- QEMU can emulate both 32-bit and 64-bit Arm CPUs. Use the ``qemu-system-aarch64`` executable to simulate a 64-bit Arm machine. You can use either ``qemu-system-arm`` or ``qemu-system-aarch64`` to simulate a 32-bit Arm machine: in general, command lines that work for ``qemu-system-arm`` will behave the same when used with ``qemu-system-aarch64``. QEMU has generally good support for Arm guests. It has support for nearly fifty different machines. The reason we support so many is that Arm hardware is much more widely varying than x86 hardware. Arm CPUs are generally built into "system-on-chip" (SoC) designs created by many different companies with different devices, and these SoCs are then built into machines which can vary still further even if they use the same SoC. Even with fifty boards QEMU does not cover more than a small fraction of the Arm hardware ecosystem. The situation for 64-bit Arm is fairly similar, except that we don't implement so many different machines. As well as the more common "A-profile" CPUs (which have MMUs and will run Linux) QEMU also supports "M-profile" CPUs such as the Cortex-M0, Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M33 (which are microcontrollers used in very embedded boards). For most boards the CPU type is fixed (matching what the hardware has), so typically you don't need to specify the CPU type by hand, except for special cases like the ``virt`` board. Choosing a board model ====================== For QEMU's Arm system emulation, you must specify which board model you want to use with the ``-M`` or ``--machine`` option; there is no default. Because Arm systems differ so much and in fundamental ways, typically operating system or firmware images intended to run on one machine will not run at all on any other. This is often surprising for new users who are used to the x86 world where every system looks like a standard PC. (Once the kernel has booted, most userspace software cares much less about the detail of the hardware.) If you already have a system image or a kernel that works on hardware and you want to boot with QEMU, check whether QEMU lists that machine in its ``-machine help`` output. If it is listed, then you can probably use that board model. If it is not listed, then unfortunately your image will almost certainly not boot on QEMU. (You might be able to extract the filesystem and use that with a different kernel which boots on a system that QEMU does emulate.) If you don't care about reproducing the idiosyncrasies of a particular bit of hardware, such as small amount of RAM, no PCI or other hard disk, etc., and just want to run Linux, the best option is to use the ``virt`` board. This is a platform which doesn't correspond to any real hardware and is designed for use in virtual machines. You'll need to compile Linux with a suitable configuration for running on the ``virt`` board. ``virt`` supports PCI, virtio, recent CPUs and large amounts of RAM. It also supports 64-bit CPUs. Board-specific documentation ============================ Unfortunately many of the Arm boards QEMU supports are currently undocumented; you can get a complete list by running ``qemu-system-aarch64 --machine help``. .. This table of contents should be kept sorted alphabetically by the title text of each file, which isn't the same ordering as an alphabetical sort by filename. .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 arm/integratorcp arm/mps2 arm/musca arm/realview arm/sbsa arm/versatile arm/vexpress arm/aspeed arm/bananapi_m2u.rst arm/b-l475e-iot01a.rst arm/sabrelite arm/highbank arm/digic arm/cubieboard arm/emcraft-sf2 arm/musicpal arm/kzm arm/nseries arm/nrf arm/nuvoton arm/imx25-pdk arm/orangepi arm/raspi arm/collie arm/sx1 arm/stellaris arm/stm32 arm/virt arm/xenpvh arm/xlnx-versal-virt arm/xlnx-zynq Emulated CPU architecture support ================================= .. toctree:: arm/emulation Arm CPU features ================ .. toctree:: arm/cpu-features