Raspberry Pi and NodeOS

Developing with QEMU and VirtualBox

For development on MacOS X, it can make sense to use Virtualbox and QEMU.

• QEMU to run the arm emulation
• Virtualbox to run Ubuntu or another distro that can edit ext4 partitions

VirtualBox

Download a base image RaspiNodeOS.img and link it to your VirtualBox Ubuntu instance:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename nodeos.vmdk -rawdisk RaspiNodeOS.img

In the VirutalBox settings panel for your instance, attach the nodeos.vmdk image as a new disk. The disk should appear as /dev/sdb:

• /dev/sdb1 should be the /boot parition
• /dev/sdb2 should be your main ext4 partition housing the NodeOS build

Edit to your hearts content! Don't foreget to unmount before booting QEMU.

QEMU

Follow the setup isntructions from Emulating Raspberry Pi the easy way. Note that you must download a linux kernel image to boot the instance.

The following should boot your system:

qemu-system-arm -kernel kernel-qemu -cpu arm1176 -m 256 -M versatilepb -no-reboot -serial stdio -append "root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 init=/nodeos/root/bin/init BOOT=1 HOME=/nodeos/root PATH=/nodeos/root/bin:/nodeos/bin npkg start nodeos-knockout" -hda RaspiNodeOS.img