Boot ARM64 virtual machines on QEMU
Note:
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Ubuntu ARM64 images can run inside QEMU. You can either do this fully emulated (e.g. on an x86 host) or accelerated with KVM if you have an ARM64 host. This page describes how to do both.
Note:
This requires Ubuntu 20.04 or greater
Install QEMU
The first step is to install the qemu-system-arm package, which needs to be done regardless of where the ARM64 virtual machine will run:
sudo apt install qemu-system-arm
Create necessary support files
Next, create a VM-specific flash volume for storing NVRAM variables, which are necessary when booting EFI firmware:
truncate -s 64m varstore.img
We also need to copy the ARM UEFI firmware into a bigger file:
truncate -s 64m efi.img
dd if=/usr/share/qemu-efi-aarch64/QEMU_EFI.fd of=efi.img conv=notrunc
Fetch the Ubuntu cloud image
You need to fetch the ARM64 variant of the Ubuntu cloud image you would like to use in the virtual machine. You can go to the official Ubuntu cloud image website, select the Ubuntu release, and then download the variant whose filename ends in -arm64.img. For example, if you want to use the latest Jammy cloud image, you should download the file named jammy-server-cloudimg-arm64.img.
Run QEMU natively on an ARM64 host
If you have access to an ARM64 host, you should be able to create and launch an ARM64 virtual machine there. Note that the command below assumes that you have already set up a network bridge to be used by the virtual machine.
sudo qemu-system-aarch64 \
-enable-kvm \
-m 1024 \
-cpu host \
-M virt \
-nographic \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=efi.img,readonly=on \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=varstore.img \
-drive if=none,file=jammy-server-cloudimg-arm64.img,id=hd0 \
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 -netdev type=tap,id=net0 \
-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0
Run an emulated ARM64 VM on x86
You can also emulate an ARM64 virtual machine on an x86 host. To do that:
sudo qemu-system-aarch64 \
-m 2048 \
-cpu max \
-M virt \
-nographic \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=efi.img,readonly=on \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=varstore.img \
-drive if=none,file=jammy-server-cloudimg-arm64.img,id=hd0 \
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
-netdev type=tap,id=net0 \
-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0
Troubleshooting
No output and no response
If you get no output from the QEMU command above, aligning your host and guest release versions may help. For example, if you generated efi.img on Focal but want to emulate Jammy (with the Jammy cloud image), the firmware may not be fully compatible. Generating efi.img on Jammy when emulating Jammy with the Jammy cloud image may help.