04-18-2023, 03:08 PM
[This is just my usual pigeon droppings---Tim has asked the right question.]
Like @adrii , I explored Raspbian over QEMU several years ago and like him I concluded it was too slow and too restricted in various ways to be much use except to show off. (I did it with a high school robotics team I was mentoring at the time so wrote it off as a learning experience.) Cross-compiling is your friend if you want to do some heavy lifting like create a custom Linux kernel for ARM devices such as the RPi.
Note that the RPi3B machine type is defined only in recent releases of QEMU. On my latest-version Linux Mint 21.1, the (Debian-based) v6.2 QEMU package supports only earlier models so separate installation of the current release is needed.
As always, Google is your friend. I see that last fall, a fellow named Radu Zaharia wrote a short series of articles for medium.com which included emulation of a RPi4-like machine using QEMU's generic "virt" ARM virtual machine. Looks quite doable but it seems to me that if you're not a dilettante (aka tinkerer) like me, there's no point in going down this path if you want to end up with a working appliance rather than an experimental coding environment.
AFAIK, Oracle VirtualBox only virtualizes the host's x86/x64 architecture for guest x86/x64 O/Ss. It can not also emulate ARM and other architectures. Of course, you could run QEMU within a guest x86/x64 O/S---definitely a baroque solution.
Regards,
Kent
Like @adrii , I explored Raspbian over QEMU several years ago and like him I concluded it was too slow and too restricted in various ways to be much use except to show off. (I did it with a high school robotics team I was mentoring at the time so wrote it off as a learning experience.) Cross-compiling is your friend if you want to do some heavy lifting like create a custom Linux kernel for ARM devices such as the RPi.
Note that the RPi3B machine type is defined only in recent releases of QEMU. On my latest-version Linux Mint 21.1, the (Debian-based) v6.2 QEMU package supports only earlier models so separate installation of the current release is needed.
As always, Google is your friend. I see that last fall, a fellow named Radu Zaharia wrote a short series of articles for medium.com which included emulation of a RPi4-like machine using QEMU's generic "virt" ARM virtual machine. Looks quite doable but it seems to me that if you're not a dilettante (aka tinkerer) like me, there's no point in going down this path if you want to end up with a working appliance rather than an experimental coding environment.
AFAIK, Oracle VirtualBox only virtualizes the host's x86/x64 architecture for guest x86/x64 O/Ss. It can not also emulate ARM and other architectures. Of course, you could run QEMU within a guest x86/x64 O/S---definitely a baroque solution.
Regards,
Kent
