Versatile Express
The Versatile Express family of development platforms provides users with a modular board design for use testing different ARM SOC design implementations. QEMU provides the ability to emulate ARM Versatile Express for Cortex-A9 on your desktop computer for easy experimentation!
Technical Specifications
- ARM Versatile Express for Cortex-A9
- 1GB RAM
- 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet
For more information on Versatile Express or QEMU visit their websites.
Running Fedora through QEMU
This page will give you detailed instructions for running Fedora 18 Beta through QEMU. The tarball includes all that is needed to boot your system including the root filesystem image and the pre-extracted kernel and initramfs. Also, included for your convenience are two scripts to boot using a serial connection or the XFCE desktop.
Download the image
The first step is to download the Fedora 18 Beta image:
Download and verify the checksum:
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/test/18-Beta/Images/armhfp/Fedora-18-Beta-armhfp-Images-CHECKSUM sha256sum --check Fedora-18-Beta-armhfp-Images-CHECKSUM
Preparing the Image
Linux Users
Extract the tarball using the graphical user interface or the following commandline option:
tar xvJf Fedora-18-Beta-vexpress-armhfp.tar.xz
Windows Users
QEMU is also available on Windows but is not yet covered in this guide. For more information on running QEMU on Windows please visit their website.
Using Fedora through QEMU
First you will need to install the ARM QEMU package (this example is using Fedora)
yum install qemu-system-arm
Once installed, change to the boot directory of the extracted kernel package:
cd F18-vexpress-xfce-20121218/boot/
From there execute the provided script. Choose from the following boot scripts
For serial console:
./boot-vexpress vmlinuz-3.6.10-6.fc18.armv7hl initramfs-3.6.10-6.fc18.armv7hl.img ../F18-vexpress-xfce-20121218.img
For XFCE Desktop:
./boot-vexpress+x vmlinuz-3.6.10-6.fc18.armv7hl initramfs-3.6.10-6.fc18.armv7hl.img ../F18-vexpress-xfce-20121218.img
The default root password is "fedora". This should be changed immediately.
Release Notes
- This test image includes the updates-testing repository enabled by default.
- Images were composed using tools in Fedora 17 due to continuing work on Fedora 18.
- The image will automatically be relabeled for SE Linux, this may take some time and will reboot when finished.
Additional Support
There are Fedora ARM users all around the globe - if you need assistance, would like to provide feedback or contribute to Fedora ARM please visit us on the IRC - we can be found in #fedora-arm on Freenode. You can also contact us on the mailing list - arm@lists.fedoraproject.org