Pi Emulator?

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Anyone know if a Pi emulator exists (for Linux or Windows) or if
someone is working on one?

Did a quick search on the forum and only found Speccy emulators.
What I would like to have is an emulator that mimics the Pi either under
Linux or Windows.

[itimpi]

Search for Qemu.

You should be able to find a link where you can download a ready-to-run Qemu+Debian install for Windows. just a case of unzipping the download and then running the contained batch file. Sorry but I do not have the URL to hand.

[soslug]

I have a stepped procedure to emulate the PI as follows here I have not been able to alter the screen resolution to anything more useful than 640 x 480 but soneone can post the answer here.

http://wiki.soslug.org/wiki/raspberry_pi_emulation

have fun

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Search for Qemu.

You should be able to find a link where you can download a ready-to-run Qemu+Debian install for Windows. just a case of unzipping the download and then running the contained batch file. Sorry but I do not have the URL to hand.

Thanks but QEMU+Debian is for a Virtual Machine, I'm looking for an emulator.

[AndrewS]

Thanks but QEMU+Debian is for a Virtual Machine, I'm looking for an emulator.

Errrr, and the difference is??? You do realise what the "EMU" in QEMU stands for?!

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Thanks but QEMU+Debian is for a Virtual Machine, I'm looking for an emulator.

Errrr, and the difference is??? You do realise what the "EMU" in QEMU stands for?!

OK, but does QEMU completely mimic the Pi so if I want to try out a bare metal OS and don't have a Pi yet, I could use the emulator to test.
It's important to note that the QEMU+Debian solution is dependent on Linux
whereas the emulator is well emulating the Pi hardware.

[AndrewS]

OK, but does QEMU completely mimic the Pi so if I want to try out a bare metal OS and don't have a Pi yet, I could use the emulator to test.

Ah, I see. I don't believe QEMU yet emulates enough of the Pi-specific hardware to run a bare-metal OS. And given the proprietary nature of the GPU-side that may never happen?

The people at Broadcom may have such an 'emulator' (for the BCM2835 rather than the Pi specifically) but it would be an internal-company-use only tool. So I'm afraid you'll just have to continue to be patient waiting for your Pi...

[SamManDude]

If you want to simulate a Raspberry PI, I would suggest downloading; 'Oracle VM Virtualbox', from this you can run any operating systems on your PC, it's really easy to set up, and also you can tweak the settings as you're setting it up to be exactly the same as a raspberry pi!
I did this before I got mine delivered, just to get to grips with the user interface of LXDE

If you need any help with setting it up just message me

Sam

[DuncanKennedy]

VirtualBox is a great program, but it only allows you to virtualise your existing hardware. This means if you are running it on an X86 machine, you can emulate many other X86 environments, but it does not emulate other processor architectures.

If you want to get close to a Pi environment, Qemu will let you emulate the Arm processor, network hardware, memory requirements etc. You can even run the un modified distributions from the download page. It will not exactly duplicate the hardware (GPU is a example). At this point the is not a software emulator which will give you an exact copy of a Pi, without actually having access to a real Pi.

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Thanks for the replies.
It's pretty much what I thought.

[ghans]

AFAIK there is no reason why QEMU wouldn't work . It emulates the ARM Core of the Pi almost exactly . If you are interestested in bare -metal programming , you'd just have to specify your own kernel.img at the Qemu command line.

The only things which aren't comparable are USB (choose one) and the GPU (none) inside QEMU.

Furthermore , you'd just have to look where/how the GPU loads the Kernel on the Pi - but this behaviour cannot changed anyway.

The Linux version really offers enough choice of ARM Cores , architectures and USB chipsets.

ghans
ghans

[mjlally]

Faumachine looks interesting but not sure if it supports ARM yet.

http://www3.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/ ... AUmachine/

[AndrewS]

Faumachine looks interesting but not sure if it supports ARM yet.
http://www3.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/ ... AUmachine/

That page you linked to says "The FAUmachine virtual machine runs as a normal user process (no root privileges or kernel modules needed) on top of (currently) Linux on i386 and AMD64 hardware."
And the "last news" is from August last year

[ren41]

Am I the ony one who is finding qemu really slow? About 1/6th of the speed of a raspberry pi, if not slower. Windows 7, 4mg RAM.

No network at the moment either but need to let it through ISA Server.

ren

[spurious]

Am I the ony one who is finding qemu really slow? About 1/6th of the speed of a raspberry pi, if not slower. Windows 7, 4mg RAM.

No network at the moment either but need to let it through ISA Server.

ren

4mg RAM.... I see the problem
quem is emulating an ARM processor, so it's software not hardware, which I would expect to be slow compared to actual hardware.

[DuncanKennedy]

I don't have a real Pi yet, so can't be sure, but I am running multiple distros under qemu using Windows 7 on an i7 2600k machine with lots of memory. Based on descriptions from other users based on their experience browsing etc on actual Pi hardware, it would seem that the emulated Pi's I'm using are at least as fast as a real one.

Like many things, performance always depends on available horsepower and resources.

[ren41]

Am I the ony one who is finding qemu really slow? About 1/6th of the speed of a raspberry pi, if not slower. Windows 7, 4mg RAM.

No network at the moment either but need to let it through ISA Server.

ren

4mg RAM.... I see the problem
quem is emulating an ARM processor, so it's software not hardware, which I would expect to be slow compared to actual hardware.

But, aren't you amazed that I can run W7 in only 4mb?

ren

[ghans]

I tested different builds for Windows .. there are Cygwin ones which are AWFULLY slow.
David T. Reynolds built a special RPi Qemu Manager for Windows recently .. you may try and look if its faster.
On Linux , Qemu feels much more responsive.

ghans