Re: Booting Debian Raspberry Pi image under QEMU?

[john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com>]

On 11/14/25 2:33 PM, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to boot a Debian raspberry Pi image under qemu; specifically,
> it is
>
>    https://raspi.debian.net/tested/20231109_raspi_4_bookworm.img.xz
>
> listed in
>
>    https://raspi.debian.net/tested-images/.
>
> After downloading, checking sha256sum, unxz-ing and resizing the image
> to 4G with qemu-img resize, this is the incantation I try:
>
>      qemu-system-aarch64 \
>      -display none \
>      -machine raspi4b \
>      -cpu cortex-a72 \
>      -dtb bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb \
>      -m 2G \
>      -smp 4 \
>      -serial stdio \
>      -kernel vmlinuz-6.1.0-13-arm64 \
>      -append "earlycon=pl011,mmio32,0xfe201000 \
>              console=ttyAMA0,115200 \
>              root=/dev/mmcblk1p2 \
>              rootfstype=ext4 \
>              fsck.repair=no \
>              rootwait \
>              init=/bin/bash" \
>      -initrd initrd.img-6.1.0-13-arm64 \
>      -drive format=raw,20231109_raspi_4_bookworm.img
>
> (don't ask ;-)
>
> But qemu complains
>
>    qemu-system-aarch64: could not load kernel 'vmlinuz-6.1.0-13-arm64'
>
> Mounting the image's first partition (losetup -P, then mount the first,
> e.g /dev/loop0p1) confirms that there is a "vmlinuz-6.1.0-13-arm64"
> there, also a 20231109_raspi_4_bookworm.img (in that partition's file
> systems root).
>
> Could someone beat me with a clue stick to get one step further?
>
> How does one go about debugging such a boot machinery?
>
> Thanks for any insight.
A stab in the dark, the '-boot' option allows you to controle the boot 
sequence.

I would also stripdown the command as much as possible and build up from 
there!

--
John Doe