Re: Rpi considerations

Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

Pi OS images are designed to be relashed to a Pi SD card, so don't UEFI
which is probably the way KVM/QEMU wants to boot them.  There are generic
Arm server images which probably will boot, and you can then install GUI
packages. You won't get GPU acceleration as there's no idea of Pi GPU
passthrough.

A useful source of Arm VM images is the UTM hypervisor for Apple Silicon Macs:

https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/

The bundles contain a disc image that will run via QEMU or virt-manager - it uses
Apple's hypervisor kit on Macs, while on Linux you can use KVM.
That way they are already set up to boot in QEMU.

If you have a Mac, importing the VM into UTM will also tell you the flags it
runs QEMU with, which could be handy for setting up video etc.  The details
are in the .plist file which would need transcribing to QEMU flags if you
don't have a Mac.

(QEMU will also run the non-ARM64 images, just you have to run them via
qemu-system-x86_64 or whatever, and they'll be emulated and slower)

Theo