Developing QEMU on Asahi Linux (or Arm in general)

submited by
Style Pass
2023-06-03 13:30:02

Recently I described how igb, a new Intel NIC support for QEMU, was added here. The development was done on an x86 machine until I buy a M2 Macbook Air, which carries Arm-based Apple Silicon. This computer is way faster than the x86 machine so I decided to use Asahi Linux, a community port of Linux for Apple Silicon and to move the development to this new machine.

You can find details like currently supported features on its wiki and fantastic write-ups about the development on its blog. Here, I describe what worked well during my QEMU development on the platform, or what didn’t (and how I fixed them).

Asahi Linux works so well, which may be surprising if you don’t closely follow the development, finding skilled and motivated developers and tooling like m1n1 hypervisor.

The introduction of GPU driver made it truly pleasant to work with. The GPU driver is one of the challenging features and while it still lacks functionalities of modern OpenGL versions like 4.0+, it implements everything that is needed to provide a decent desktop experience. Things I regularly use like GNOME, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Visual Studio Code all work just fine1.

Leave a Comment