I’m honestly a little skeptical of this, but I’ve seen suggestions that it’s possible to run Raspberry Pi software under Proxmox (itself running on x86). Is this in fact possible, or have I misunderstood something? If it is possible, any docs on how to do it? I’m not finding much of anything with Google, which suggests I’d misunderstood, but I’d be glad to hear to the contrary.
Hi Dan
AFAIK, Qemu can, to a certain extent - emulate “other” CPUs… (eg ARM or PowerPC-CPUs).
PowerPC-CPUs were extremly slow under Intel, but my tests were a few years back…
I haven’t really reviewed this for ARM, as a Raspberry is much cheaper than a Mac…
(Besides which, Apple has already moved away from Intel)…
Maybe this helps:
https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/target-arm.html
and
https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/arm/raspi.html
As per the official Docs for Proxmox,
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Qemu/KVM_Virtual_Machines
Qemu can emulate a great variety of hardware from ARM to Sparc, but Proxmox VE is only concerned with 32 and 64 bits PC clone emulation, since it represents the overwhelming majority of server hardware. The emulation of PC clones is also one of the fastest due to the availability of processor extensions which greatly speed up Qemu when the emulated architecture is the same as the host architecture.
My 2 cents
Andy
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PowerPC = RISC.
ARM = RISC
Why ARM should be “faster” without any recompilation than PowerPC?
That sounds like enough of an answer–it might be do-able, but it’s going to be hack-y and therefore probably fragile.
VMs are great for trying out software, but sometimes the software in question just isn’t designed for x64. Current example:
Of course, a Pi is cheap, but you don’t always have a spare lying around (or, in my present case, a spare power supply). It’d be nice to be able to load up a .img into a VM and see how it runs–doesn’t look like that’s going to be feasible though.
What about installing Pimox on a Raspberry?
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Hi Dan
Could be as easy as copying a lib…
And editing the VM config file…
But would seem to be usable…
So what?
The architecture is equally distant, even if the processor design of CISC and RISC are changed and a lot.
But still no architecture is “comfortable” doing the “other” one job/code, even the company from Cupertino moved massively to ARM/RISC for both the families of devices (portable and deskable).
Rosetta and Rosetta2 are wonderful pieces of software, but only the depth control of development process, compilation and tools can achieve a sort-of-realtime-compilation for applications designed for other CPUs.
The virtual machine between the hardware and the software, the difference between executables and bytecodes are the thing that can make run Android apps on ARM and x64.
But virtualizing a SoC like the one of Raspberry on x64 cpu is… wasting power.
@danb35 i don’t know if i understand correctly but if you want to try aarch64 vm on proxmox, i have some old notes:
create new vm, Type Linux Version: 5.x - 2.6 Kernel, select as bios OVMF(UEFI) and Machine i440fx, use scsi for HD
before start the vm you must edit the config file, usually in: /etc/pve/qemu-server/VMIDNUMBER.conf
you should
add: “arch: aarch64”, “serial0: socket”
delete the line: vmgenid:
change: ide from ide2 to scsi2 on cdrom, vga to “vga: serial0”, change boot order
with centos 8, start VM, open console and select standard installation, wait for fallback on text install, configure and install…
it’s not like a real server but it should work for some arm testing.
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