Test a bootable ISO, CDROM or USB stick using QEMU

[oshunluvr]

I learned something new and useful lately while updating my Multi-System bootable USB stick. You can test-boot an ISO, CDROM, or USB stick from the command line if you have KVM-QEMU installed. It's as simple as:

For ISO/CDs:
sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom filename.iso

For USB:
sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -hda /dev/sdx



I couldn't get anything to actually run from this window, but it's a neat and quick way to test something's boot-ability before actually trying to boot to it.

[claydoh]

I was using qemu to load an arm based installer build (to be used on my Lenovo 10e tablet and Duet 5 convertible, but I can't find the exact command lol. Not quite as simple as the above, the string being about half a kilometer long lol, but it is quite cool how much qemu can do.

[oshunluvr]

You mean like this?

https://futurewei-cloud.github.io/AR...ch-aarch64-vm/

[claydoh]

No, not quite. Ok, maybe, considering I probably have all the components for arm64 cross-compiling on my PC, for building Cadmium.

qemu-system-aarch64 -M virt -cpu cortex-a57 -kernel tmp/linux-arm64/arch/arm64/boot/Image -nographic -m 2G -serial mon:stdio -append "console=ttyAMA0,115200 root=/dev/vda3" -drive file=mytest.img,if=virtio,format=raw

This specifically calls the kernel image that was compiled from its build location.

However, this seems to no longer work lol! Things have changed a fair bit since January on the Cadmium project, so the docs are probably outdated.
It has been some time since I was setting this all up some months ago. And I didn't take notes lol.

it would be easier if all these arm and arm64 devices had uefi
But that is overkill for (mostly) non-plug-and-play System-on-Chip situations.

[jlittle]

I couldn't get anything to actually run from this window...

With

sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4G -cdrom kubuntu-jammy.iso

it sort of worked, but very, very slowly. About 10 minutes to the try or install kubuntu choice, and several minutes more to kubuntu running. The snap daemon failed to start, so I couldn't run firefox...