I want to virtualize aarch (armv8) and armhf (armv7) with qemu and use Cortex-A7 as CPU. I'm an IT Engineer having not much experience with qemu, so I started to look for the best approach and after finding out that most ARM/RPI-Tutorials are actually using an quite old and resticted hardware setup I've followed these two tutorials that recommend using Debian + the "virt" board:
- https://translatedcode.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/installing-debian-on-qemus-64-bit-arm-virt-board/
- https://phwl.org/2022/qemu-aarch64-debian/
I guess this is exactly what I need and all steps work on real hardware (qemu on my laptop) but in the end I need to run the qemu-setup on a VM on our ESXi hypervisor. Debian installation on these VMs takes forever so I tried to install Debian with qemu on my local laptop and then copy the files to a VM on the hypervisor.
However this does not work, I cannot boot the linux on the VM since the root partition is not found. It looks like this is somehow related to virtio but also enabling hardware accelation for the VM, activating libvirtd or manually loading libvirt kernel modules did not work.
I tried to install Debian as described in the blog-posts + with a different qemu-setup where I don't use the virtio hard-drive but try to use IDE. However, on the VM, I always get virtio errors on kernel boot however, so I'm a bit lost what could be the root cause.
Any ideas if I'm doing something wrong? It's not straight-forward for me to find the right qemu flags or manually configure virtio/libvirt-stuff, so I help is highly appreciated. Thanks!
Additional details:
- host system is in both cases Manjaro Linux 22
- qemu output in success case: https://pastebin.com/TWLrPvZY
- qemu output in failure case: https://pastebin.com/vjpS7ZnU
- qemu steps (first approach with virtio vda): https://pastebin.com/35C8DiX9
- qemu septs (second approach with sda drive): https://pastebin.com/QjKeT2f2
