Running 64- and 32-bit RISC-V Linux on QEMU

This is a “hello world” example of booting Linux on RISC-V QEMU. This guide covers some basic steps to get Linux running on RISC-V. It is recomended that if you are interested in a specific distrubution you follow their steps. For example if you are interested in running Debian, they have instructions on their wiki https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V. Most distrobutions (Debian, Fedora, OpenEmbedded, buildroot, OpenSUSE, FreeBSD and others) support RISC-V.

Prerequisites

Running Linux on QEMU RISC-V requires you to install some prerequisites. Find instructions for various Linux distributions as well as macOS below:

Getting the sources

First, create a working directory, where we’ll download and build all the sources.

Then download all the required sources, which are:

git clone https://github.com/qemu/qemu
git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux
git clone https://git.busybox.net/busybox

You will also need to install a RISC-V toolchain. It is recomendded to install a toolchain from your distro. This can be done by using your distro’s installed (apt, dnf, pacman or something similar) and searching for riscv64 and installing gcc. If that doesn’t work you can use a prebuilt toolchain from: https://toolchains.bootlin.com.

Build QEMU with the RISC-V target:

Build Linux for the RISC-V target. First, checkout to a desired version:

Then compile the kernel:

Build Busybox:

cd busybox
CROSS_COMPILE=riscv{{bits}}-unknown-linux-gnu- make defconfig
CROSS_COMPILE=riscv{{bits}}-unknown-linux-gnu- make -j $(nproc)

Running

Go back to your main working directory and run: