I'm trying to build packages for Alpine Linux, which has official support for x86, x86_64, armhf, aarch64, s390x, ppc64le, so I want to build for all of these architectures.

Currently I'm using QEMU's user mode emulation to run chroot environments of these architectures on a x86_64 host, but it seems that it's quite unstable and often lead to crashes. So now I'm trying to run full virtual machines using QEMU.

Installing Alpine Linux for the non-ARM architectures is quite simple and can be done by attaching the .iso images provided in the official download page. However, it's a different story for ARM. There is no other things provided except the archives for netboot and u-boot so I have no idea how to install it. I have tried extracting the archive for netboot and setting -kernel and -initrd to the extracted files but that didn't work. (The full command I used was qemu-system-aarch64 -M vexpress-a9 -kernel vmlinuz-vanilla -initrd initrd-vanilla -append "root=/dev/ram") I got no output in the terminal and Guest had not initialized the display (yet) in the VNC window.

So how can I get the virtual machine booted up? Thanks.

Finally, I successfully booted the virtual machines up.

aarch64

Simply use a command to the following one:

qemu-system-aarch64 

  -M virt -m 512M -cpu cortex-a57  # Required, cortex-a53 is OK too

  -kernel vmlinuz-vanilla -initrd initramfs-vanilla  # These two files are from the netboot archive

  -append "console=ttyAMA0 ip=dhcp alpine_repo=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main/  # The console argument is required to get console output

  -nographic

armhf

A custom kernel is needed. The one I built is available in my GitHub repo. I used the script from another repo but added some more drivers.

qemu-system-arm 

  -M versatilepb -m 256M -cpu arm1176 

  -kernel vmlinuz -dtb versatile-pb.dtb  # From my repo mentioned above

  -initrd initramfs-vanilla  # From netboot archive

  -append "console=ttyAMA0 ip=dhcp alpine_repo=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main/  # Same as aarch64

  -nographic

UPDATE The official kernel in the netboot archive can also work if used with a proper dtb file, which can be extracted from the Alpine's linux-vanilla package in the main repo. e.g. -M vexpress-a15 -kernel vmlinuz-vanilla -dtb vexpress-v2p-ca15_a7.dtb (another machine type with corresponding dtb should also work)