Hello,

Is it possible to run SARPi installer (or an image of the final system) in qemu?

I loop mounted the image to get the kernel, initrd and dtb files but still I only get a black window.

I have a minimum slackware distribution installed on a raspberry pi3 (unsing SARPi installer) and what I'd like to achieve is to have a test/build environment to build packages from slackbuilds or similar and test things before copying them to the raspberry box.

Please share your qemu-system-aarch64 command line arguments.

I also read that the kernel shipped in SARPi works only on the raspberry board and qemu is not compatible with it, so the kernel must be rebuild to have it working with qemu, is that true? if so, where can I get more information about it?

Thanks!

SARPi is in a nut shell, a package of documentation and supporting files to be able to load and run the port of Slackware on ARM ("Slackware ARM") on the Raspberry Pi (hence "SA" (Slackware ARM) (on a) "RPi" Raspberry Pi)". It's not a distribution in its own right.

QEMU does not emulate the hardware on a Raspberry Pi, and QEMU is no longer supported by Slackware ARM. The hardware support ("Versatile Express") is still in the kernel, but I stopped maintaining and testing it some time ago, and it no longer works properly.
If you want to get Slackware ARM working with QEMU, you should read that installation document and get hacking.

You got that right! Maybe now you've stated what SARPi is people might take a little more notice. Nobody ever installs SARPi. They install Slackware ARM. SARPi is not, and never will be, a distribution. It's as you say; just a means to install Slackware ARM on the RPi(s).

WHY DON'T PEOPLE GET THIS????

Thanks for your reply. I have seen guides about versatile express but always thought they were outdated, since as qemu 2.12, there are raspi2 and raspi3. Playing around with arch linux's raspberry pi images (http://il.us.mirror.archlinuxarm.org/os/) I was able to get up to init for raspi2 and uboot for raspi3. I also tried with raspbian, but no luck.

Basically I just wanted to know if anyone was using qemu, thanks.

What exactly do you want to achieve? Why do you want to emulate a Raspberry Pi specifically?
The ARM Versatile was chosen as the supported machine type because it offered the best combination of hardware emulation - amount of RAM, and storage interface.
When I checked last week, QEMU does not support the SoC that compromises any of the Raspberry Pi models.

Unless there's something in particular about the Raspberry Pi hardware that you wanted to emulate, it makes not much difference as to which machine you're emulating.
When real hardware is affordable, in my opinion it's really not worth using QEMU to emulate ARM - which is also why I am not spending any time maintaining it. It's so slow as to be nothing but a frustrating experience.