Along with PetaLinux, Xilinx provide a QEMU (Quick Emulator) for emulation Zynq/ZynqMP/MicroBlaze device on host PC. With QEMU, you can run Zynq programs, even a full Linux system without a real hardware. It's very easy to interactive with it petalinux-boot --qemu. But how if we want to boot from SD card?
Requirements
Assume a bootable image is created by petalinux-build or other tools. This including device tree, u-boot, kernel and RootFS. (FSBL, bitstream is not needed).
Create SD Card Image
First we need a image file of the SD card. We will create the file qemu_sd.img from sketch:
dd if=/dev/zero of=qemu_sd.img bs=512M count=1
If the image file size is too small to hold your RootFS, change bs=512M to something larger.
Next step is create partition of image, just like a real hard drive:
sudo sfdisk qemu_sd.img <<-__EOF__
1M,48M,0xE,*
,,,-
__EOF__
You can do it with other partition tool too.
Format SD Image
After the partition table is ready, we need to format the two partitions. But this not as easy as format real SD card. It need some trick. The first step is to mount the file to loop device:
sudo losetup -f --show -P qemu_sd.img
The -f --show flags tells losetup to find first unused /dev/loopx device and show to user. The -P flag tells the tool to scan the partition table.
If no loop device is used, loop0 will be use. Then two device /dev/loop0p1 and /dev/loop0p2 is created. So we can format them:
sudo mkfs.vfat -F 16 -n BOOT /dev/loop0p1
sudo mkfs.ext4 -L rootfs /dev/loop0p2
Create two folders for mount:
mkdir BOOT
mkdir rootfs
Mount the loop0px device:
sudo mount /dev/loop0p1 BOOT
sudo mount /dev/loop0p2 rootfs
Install Kernel and RootFS
Copy Linux kernel and RootFS to SD image:
cp image.ub BOOT
sudo cp armhf_bionic_rootfs/* -a rootfs
Then unmount the device:
sudo umount BOOT
sudo umount rootfs
Delete the loop0px device:
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0
QEMU Boot to SD Image
petalinux-boot --qemu --u-boot --qemu-args "-drive file=qemu_sd.img,if=sd,format=raw"
If everything works, you can see QEMU console and the emulator is booting from u-boot. U-boot will load and boot Kernel from emulated SD device.