How to build qemu-system-arm in Linux

Most (all?) Linux distributions have a binary package for qemu-system (including qemu-system-arm) in order to emulate non-x86 targets such as ARM, MIPS, PPC, Alpha and more.

However, in some case you may need to very latest version of qemu-system and it may not be able yet for your distribution.

Here’s how to do to build qemu-system-arm without building all qemu-system-***:

1. Download the (qemu 1.0.1 at the time this post was written):

   wget 

   or get the latest source code (development tree) which has the very latest features and bug fixes, but may not work or compile:

   git clone git://git.qemu.org/qemu.git

   or get the latest source code from linaro (which may be more up-to-date for ARM targets):

   git clone git://git.linaro.org/qemu/qemu-linaro.git

2. Configure qemu to build ARM targets:

   cd qemu
   ./configure --target-list=arm-softmmu,arm-linux-user

3. Build and install qemu-system-arm:

   make -j 2
   sudo make install

4. Verify the latest version of qemu-ssytem-arm is installed:

   # qemu-system-arm --version
   QEMU emulator version 1.0,1, Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard

Read more:

1. 

   Nikolay Nikolaev
   March 8th, 2012 at 18:00 |

   |

   For ARM, I’d always prefer the Linaro’s qemu:
   

   • 
     March 8th, 2012 at 18:31 |

     |

     Yes, you’re probably right about that, especially for ARMv7 platforms.

2. 

   Tim
   March 27th, 2012 at 09:47 |

   |

   I followed the steps here but did not end up seeing a change in version when running qemu-system-arm –version

   I was unable to get the “make install” to work without sudo. Maybe that is a clue as to what I did wrong?

   TIA for help!

3. 
   March 27th, 2012 at 10:04 |

   |

   
   I’ve updated the steps to use “sudo make install” instead. Sorry about that.

   If qemu-system-arm version has not changed, it’s possible your old qemu is installed in a different path.

   Assuming the make install worked, run “locate qemu-system-arm” to see the locations of qemu-system-arm.

   (If there is only one and this is the old one, run “updatedb” first and then “locate qemu-system-arm”)

   If you want to overwrite your old qemu with the new one, you can use –prefix=INSTALL_PATH with configure, something like:

   ./configure --target-list=arm-softmmu,arm-linux-user --prefix=/usr/local

   or you can just use the full path to run it, e.g. /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-arm

4. 

   Eschol
   April 17th, 2012 at 14:17 |

   |

   @cnxsoft
   Do you know if the QEMU supports Qualcomm MSM ARM board series? How can one enable the support for the MSM board series?

   Thanks.

5. 
   April 17th, 2012 at 14:52 |

   |

   
   You can run “qemu-system-arm -M ?” to see the list of supported boards.
   I can’t see any Qualcomm board that are supported.

   I’ve searched for “Qualcomm Virtual Platforms”, but could not find any. It appears Qualcomm will be working on this, since they are currently recruiting Virtual platform engineers.

   As long as your program does not access the hardware directly, you should be able to run your application in other ARM Cortex A8/A9 based board such as the Beagleboard.

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