qemu-system-arm fails with "no boot device found"

[Ben Howard]

When invoking qemu-system-arm thus:
qemu-system-arm -M beagle -m 512 -append 'root=/dev/mmcblk0 rw mem=512M console=ttyAMA0,115200 rootwait root=/dev/mmcblk0' -drive file=oneiric-server-cloudimg-armel.img,if=sd,cache=writeback --nographic -kernel oneiric-server-cloudimg-armel-vmlinuz-omap

Qemu fails with:
qemu: hardware error: no boot device found
CPU #0:
R00=00000000 R01=00000000 R02=00000000 R03=00000000
R04=00000000 R05=00000000 R06=00000000 R07=00000000
R08=00000000 R09=00000000 R10=00000000 R11=00000000
R12=00000000 R13=00000000 R14=00000000 R15=400140a4
PSR=400001d3 -Z-- A svc32

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: qemu-system 0.14.50-2011.06-0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: User Name 3.0.0-8.10-virtual 3.0.1
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-8-virtual x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Aug 23 17:40:21 2011
Ec2AMI: ami-0000000c
Ec2AMIManifest: FIXME
Ec2AvailabilityZone: nova
Ec2InstanceType: <nova.db.sqlalchemy.models.InstanceTypes object at 0x4a412d0>
Ec2Kernel: aki-0000000b
Ec2Ramdisk: unavailable
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: qemu-linaro
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Ben Howard (darkmuggle-deactivatedaccount)]

The error was encountered whether the machine type is "beaglexm" or "beagle".

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Using http://releases.linaro.org/images/linaro-n/alip/11.07/beagle-alip.img.gz, I'm able to boot fine with this command:

qemu-system-arm -M beaglexm -drive file=./beagle-alip.img,if=sd,cache=writeback -clock unix --nographic

So this looks like a problem with your image, not with qemu-linaro.

[Ben Howard (darkmuggle-deactivatedaccount)]

Re-opening for clarification -- if qemu is invoked with "-kernel" shouldn't the kernel be loaded instead of looking for a boot device?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Well I'm not absolutely certain, but I guess I would ask how you would expect this to work on the real omap hardware that qemu is emulating here. Can a beagle system boot a bzimage directly without the assistance of xloader+uboot? If not, how should qemu which emulates it do so?

[Ben Howard (darkmuggle-deactivatedaccount)]

Steve, thanks for the clarification.

I understand your point, however, at the very least the "-kernel" parameter should emit some message saying it is not supported. Reading the documentation, http://qemu.weilnetz.de/qemu-doc.html#direct_005flinux_005fboot, one would expect that direct boot should work.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Yes, fair enough, if the option doesn't work it should be better documented.