Using QEMU to boot OpenBMC ASPEED kernel

The LTC team at IBM have created a useful model of the ASPEED BMC SoCs and upstreamed it to QEMU. If you’re on a recent distro, you can skip building it and sudo apt-get install qemu-system-arm instead.

To build:

git clone https://github.com/legoater/qemu -b aspeed-3.0 qemu-aspeed
cd qemu-aspeed
./configure --target-list=arm-softmmu
make -j $(nproc)

Download a flash image:

wget https://openpower.xyz/job/openbmc-build/distro=ubuntu,target=evb-ast2500/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/deploy/images/evb-ast2500/flash-evb-ast2500

This will boot from an emulated flash image:

$ ./arm-softmmu/qemu-system-arm -M ast2500evb -m 512 \
 -drive file=flash-evb-ast2500,format=raw,if=mtd \
 -nodefaults -nographic  -serial stdio -net nic \
 -net user,hostname=qemu,ftp=/path/to/tftp/

If you have a kernel FIT or u-boot image you would like to test booting. In this example your image is in /srv/tftp, and is called evb.

$ ./arm-softmmu/qemu-system-arm -M ast2500evb -m 512 \
 -drive file=flash-ast2500evb,format=raw,if=mtd \
 -nodefaults -nographic  -serial stdio -net nic \
 -net user,hostname=qemu,ftp=/srv/tftp/

Press any key when u-boot prompts you, and type these three commands:

ast# setenv ethaddr DE:AD:CA:FE:BE:EF
ast# dhcp evb
ast# bootm

Written on June 8, 2018