Running FreedomBox in Qemu

Question

I wanna run the latest FreedomBox image on my Ubuntu laptop.

The FreedomBox image is for DreamPlug, a 1.2 GHz Marvell Kirkwood 88F6281 SoC (ARM9E), and my Ubuntu is v12.10 (3.5.0-17-generic i686).

I mounted the first partition (vfat) in the image file that contains the kernel and the initrd image to /mnt

$ sudo mount -o loop,offset=512 freedombox_14_nov_2011.img  /mnt/

and try to run Qemu

$ qemu-system-arm --version
QEMU emulator version 1.2.0 (Debian 1.2.0-2012.09-0ubuntu1), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
$ sudo qemu-system-arm -net dump -d cpu -M versatilepb -kernel /mnt/vmlinuz-3.0.0-kirkwood -initrd /mnt/initrd.img-3.0.0-kirkwood freedombox_14_nov_2011.img -append "root=/dev/ram0" 
pulseaudio: set_sink_input_volume() failed
pulseaudio: Reason: Invalid argument
pulseaudio: set_sink_input_mute() failed
pulseaudio: Reason: Invalid argument

but the screen in the qemu window remains black (even after minutes). Also nothing is sent over the virtual network interface:

$ tcpdump -r qemu-vlan0.pcap
reading from file qemu-vlan0.pcap, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet)
$

The qemu-system-arm process requires 100% of one core of my CPU time and qemu.log file is filled (continuously) with lines like

[...]
PSR=800001d3 N--- A svc32
R00=00000004 R01=00025307 R02=00000010 R03=0002532b
R04=00000002 R05=005635db R06=00000000 R07=00000000
R08=00025326 R09=80007efd R10=007e94c5 R11=00000001
R12=0000882d R13=007ea3e8 R14=0055036c R15=0054f1bc
PSR=800001d3 N--- A svc32
R00=00000008 R01=00000000 R02=00000008 R03=0002532c
R04=00000093 R05=005635db R06=00000000 R07=007eaa74
R08=007eaa74 R09=80007efd R10=007e94c5 R11=00000001
R12=00000088 R13=007ea3e8 R14=0055036c R15=0054f5c4
PSR=600001d3 -ZC- A svc32
R00=00000008 R01=00000000 R02=00000008 R03=0002532c
R04=00000093 R05=005635db R06=00000000 R07=007eaa74
R08=007eaa74 R09=80007efd R10=007e94c5 R11=00000001
R12=00000088 R13=007ea3e8 R14=0055036c R15=0054f1bc
PSR=800001d3 N--- A svc32
[...]

See the full log on filebin (~400kb).

Does anyone of you have a hint for me what I might be doing wrong?

Thank you very much in advance!

Manuel

Answer 1

 qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1G freedombox-stable-free_buster_all-amd64.qcow2

just works nowadays here (debian stretch on x86_64 as a host). To actually use it you need to connect to admin web interface so you can add something similar to commandline:

-device e1000,netdev=net0 -netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:443

so freedombox https (port 443) gets forwarded to your https://localhost:5555. You will need to allow unknown certificate to proceed.