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I've recently been fiddling around with Buildroot and its capabilities to create custom images for Raspberry Pi computers.

But after getting a successful build I realized that I don't actually have the right cable to connect my Raspberry Pi 4b to a monitor, and I really don't want to deal with setting up SSH in Buildroot itself.

I've read a few posts about emulating .img files in VirtualBox, but none were targeted specifically at this, and none of their fixes seemed to work. I also tried QEMU, but it didn't work either, and it seems a little advanced for my purposes.

In VirtualBox I tried adding the file as a floppy disk, changing the extension to .iso, and using the VBoxManage tool to convert it to a .vbi file. All resulted in some sort of error.

Any help in getting a Raspberry Pi environment set up in VirtualBox would be much appreciated!

Giacomo1968
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cat pouch
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1 Answers1

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Qemu can be tricky to start with but I found it to be a very robust and reliable tool after getting used to.

If you or some else is willing to give it a try, try this:

Get a kernel, dtb and possibly a premade Rasbian SD card image from https://github.com/dhruvvyas90/qemu-rpi-kernel and https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ respectively.

qemu-system-arm \
-M versatilepb -cpu arm1176 -m 256 \
-drive "file=2022-09-22-raspios-bullseye-armhf-lite.img,if=none,index=0,media=disk,format=raw,id=disk0" \
-device "virtio-blk-pci,drive=disk0,disable-modern=on,disable-legacy=off" \
-net "user,hostfwd=tcp::5022-:22" \
-dtb versatile-pb-buster-5.4.51.dtb \
-kernel kernel-qemu-5.4.51-buster \
-append 'root=/dev/vda2 panic=1' -no-reboot

First try these, make it boot. then replace the kernel and dtb with the buildroot results you made, so your sure your Qemu setup worked with known good files. Alter the qemu command line to suit your particular HOST network if needed (tap devices for wifi internet sharing for example https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Network_bridge as an example)

As a test, I followed: https://ltekieli.com/buildroot-with-raspberry-pi-what-where-and-how/ basically download or clone build root:

cd buildroot
make raspberrypi_defconfig
make -j8

(alter the j flag to correspond to the amount of threads you like to use for compiling)

I was able to boot the new buildroot sdcard image, thats inside buildroot/output/images/ But ofcourse, the kernel and dtb arent made for this particular cpu used inside qemu, nor does qemu know the raspberrypi specific cpu. Youll have to use the other kernel for now.

Here is the split in the road. What do you need a virtual Pi for? if its just editing and testing, this setup might be good enough, using buildroot you could even specifically target the arm1176 cpu and generate a working dtb for the virtual pi. Edit, connect to the internet, setup SSH.

Depending on your needs right now. I asume by this time you already figured something out, or even grabbed that cable. https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-virtualbox/ might be a an answer to virtual box specific. But again, I prefer Qemu, and has been helpfull for diagnosing and debugging software without a real Pi at hand.

CodeAsm
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