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Getting Started with xPack QEMU Arm

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Overview

xPack QEMU Arm is a standalone cross-platform (Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux) binary distribution of QEMU Arm, aimed at reproducible builds.

What are reproducible builds?

To be reproducible, an operation must remain stable over time and across different environments. In other words, if builds are repeated after some time, possibly on a different machine or platform, the resulting behavior must be functionally equivalent.

QEMU is a generic machine emulator and virtualizer.

QEMU is an open source project hosted on GitLab.

The open source xPack QEMU Arm project is hosted on GitHub as xpack-dev-tools/qemu-arm-xpack; it provides the platform specific binaries as release assets.

In addition to the binary archives and the package metadata, this project also includes the build scripts.

xPacks

xPacks (short for xpm packages) are general-purpose, language-neutral software packages.

What the heck are xPacks? Please, do not introduce another package format!

While the initial appearance may seem complex, utilizing xPacks (xpm packages) is, in fact, straightforward. The design rationale is to automate frequent operations that occur during software development, in this case the installation of dependencies, and to ensure reproducibility.

xPacks are managed by xpm (the xPack Project Manager), a program that complements the npm CLI (the popular JavaScript package manager), with new language-neutral features.

The xPacks Framework does NOT introduce a new package format; instead, it uses the same format as npm packages, which is a collection of files/folders and a package.json file with the package metadata.

xpm can install packages from the same repositories as npm, whether public or private.

The packages (usually regular archives, but also git repositories), are extracted into separate folders within the project.

Based on the content, there are two types of packets:

  • source xPacks (that install source files, usually libraries) and
  • binary xPacks (that install executables/binary files, usually tools).

The binary xPacks include references to archives with the platform specific binaries (such as .tar.gz for Unix or .zip for Windows).

These archives are also expanded along the package metadata. Since they include executables, links/forwarders to these executables are created in a .bin folder, eliminating the need to add multiple folders to the PATH.

Given that some binary xPacks, such as toolchains, can have very large archives, the packages are extracted only once into a user global location to conserve space. In projects, instead of duplicating the content of these archives, symbolic links are created.

Simply put, xPacks can be used to further automate the installation of source libraries and tools.

Features

All binaries are:

  • self-contained (include all required libraries)
  • file-system relocatable (can be installed in any location)
  • built on slightly older systems (to make them run on both old and new systems)
Compatibility with older systems

Given that most operating systems maintain significant compatibility with older versions, building an application on an older system ensures that the same binary can run on newer versions. Conversely, building an application on a newer system may utilize library features that are not available in older versions, making backward compatibility less feasible.

Benefits

The main advantages of using the xPack QEMU Arm are:

  • a convenient, uniform and portable install/uninstall/upgrade procedure; the same procedure is used for all major platforms (x64 Windows, x64 macOS, arm64 macOS, x64 GNU/Linux, arm64 GNU/Linux, arm GNU/Linux)
  • multiple versions of the same package can be installed at the same time on the same system
  • no need to worry about dependent libraries, they are all included
  • significantly lighter and easier to use than Docker images that provide similar functionality and are GNU/Linux centric
  • projects can be tied to specific tools versions; this provides a good reproducibility, especially useful in CI/CD environments.

Compatibility

The xPack QEMU RISC-V project is fully compatible with the upstream QEMU.

It includes support for qemu-system-arm and qemu-system-aarch64.

Install

The executables and other related files can be installed automatically with xpm or manually by downloading the platform specific archives.

The details of installing the xPack QEMU Arm on various platforms are presented in the Install Guide.

Documentation

The original QEMU Arm documentation is available from the project web site:

Release schedule

This distribution generally follows the official QEMU releases, but retains only about one release per year.

Support & feedback

The quick advice for getting support and providing feedback is to use the GitHub Discussions.

For additional information, please refer to the Help Centre page.

Change log

The release and change log is available in the repository CHANGELOG.md file.

Maintainer & Developer information

For information on the workflow used to make releases, please see the Maintainer Info page.

For information on how to build the binaries, please see the Developer Info page.

However, the ultimate source for details are the build scripts themselves, all available from the qemu-arm-xpack.git/build-assets/scripts folder. The scripts include common code from the @xpack-dev-tools/xbb-helper package.

License

Unless otherwise stated, the original content is released under the terms of the MIT License, with all rights reserved to Liviu Ionescu.

The binary distributions include several open-source components; the corresponding licenses are available in each archive in the distro-info/licenses folder.

Releases

The list of releases is available in the Releases pages.

MacStadium

Credits

Special thanks to MacStadium, for providing the Apple Silicon development infrastructure as part of their generous Free and Open Source Software program.

Enjoyed Using This Project? Let Us Know!

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  • Donate: Your contributions (small or generous) help us keep the xPack projects thriving. Donate
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