Step-by-step Using qemu to Boot an Emulated Odroid

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS -- PLEASE DON"T EDIT. You can comment using the discussion page

This tutorial is for Linux Developers using Linux hosts. It is really not for Windows hosts -- although you can certainly work through this tutorial on a virtual machine guest.

It was tested on a "clean" Debian 6 machine, a VMWare virtual machine. You can find your own copy here: Debian6t VM VMWare Player is free as well: VMWare Player

Introduction

(say what qemu is for)

Prerequisites

You need a Linux host (or virtual machine) running a Debian-based distribution: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Knoppix, etc.

The example file set will let you boot an emulated machine, without any odroid hardware

Overview

We are going to:

Do some setup on the host

Download the example files and extract them

Build qemu if required

Create a root file system partition image from a root file system tarball

Boot the system in a simple way

Configure a network bridge

Boot the system with full network support

Host Setup

Make sure you have the neccessary programs installed

# update the list of available packages
# as root:
apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libpixman-1-dev zlib1g-dev libglib2.0-dev shtool 

Download Example Files

You can use your browser, or use web get to get the example files tarball.

# Go to some convenient folder, home if you like
cd ~
# Get the example files
wget http://odroid.us/odroid/users/osterluk/
wget http://odroid.us/odroid/users/osterluk/tbd.md5sum
md5sum -c tdb
# Assuming the md5sum is correct, continue

Here are the files we now have:

rootfs.tar.gz. The resulting root file system image. You can write this to your SD-Card if you just want to see it work

buildroot-2012.11.tar.bz2. This is the current version of buildroot

odroidu2_just_busybox_defconfig. This is the tested buildroot configuration we need, it only includes busybox and nothing else.

nfs-mounting-boot.tgz. This is a boot partition image. You can extract this to your SD-Card boot partition, if you don't want to build your own kernel we need a kernel that included the smsc95xx driver for odroid-U2 in order to bring up the network.