You can add expensive components and operate on a larger scale than you would normally be able to.

A Raspberry Pi simulator helps you work outside your budget.Here's the patches: diff -git a/install.sh b/install.sh index 62f3425.1f101ba 100755 - a/install.sh +++ b/install.sh -2,7 +2,7 set -euxo pipefail -readonly IMAGE='-raspbian-buster-lite' +readonly IMAGE='-raspbian-buster' readonly KERNEL='kernel-qemu-5.4.51-buster' readonly PTB='versatile-pb-buster-5.4.51.A simulator has several advantages that can be useful in your electronics project. Looks like I'll need a real Raspberry Pi for my experiments. This also explains why X under QEMU is *sooo slow*. Essentially it's just drawing into a chunk of memory and handing it to QEMU to draw to the real screen. X works because it's using the standard linux framebuffer, which is a minimal graphics structure in main memory that does no acceleration. That means I'll never get the hardware acceleration I need for testing IdealOS. So what's the deal? Why can X run but not the opengl samples?Īfter further research I've determined that QEMU emulates the main ARM CPU, but *not* the custom graphics chip in the Pi. Then I was able to get X to boot: WHAAA?! So I modified the scripts to use raspbian-buster instead of raspbian-buster-lite, turn off the headless option, then ran the entire process again. These instructions won't give me any graphics because it's using the 'lite' version of Raspbian which doesn't include a desktop and X11. But I could have *sworn* I'd seen QEMU running a Raspbian desktop. I tried running the example command line graphics programs in /vc/opt but they wouldn't work, complaining that it can't access the vchiq. run.sh will run it as a headless instance, giving me a bash shell into a virtual Pi. The two scripts in this repo get the job done reliably./install.sh willl download QEMU, a Raspbian distro, and all of the required deps. Fortunately the open source emulation tool QEMU is up to the task.įollowing the instructions here, I was able to download and run QEMU on my Mac. That means I need an emulator, not just an OS conatiner wrapper like Docker. The RaspberryPi is an ARM computer and most Macs (until a few months ago) are X86. The short version is: yes it can be done but it's useless for graphics. As part of that I wanted to emulate a Raspberry Pi on my Mac.

I've paused my work on Filament for a while to go back and do some more research into low level graphics for IdealOS.

Mac os7 emulator raspberry pi