Is there an existing Vero 4K QEMU emulator "image"?

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

Has anyone pre-built a Vero 4k QEMU emulator image?

I want to play around on the environment, without mucking about with my actual Vero device.

THANKS!
-Zac

2

Short answer is no, there isn’t

3

Long answer, has someone come up with a build that’s “close enough” to do testing?

Thanks!

4

Hi

What would you like to test?

You can reinstall OSMC quite easily, and as we use LVM to partition the eMMC you can even take snapshots easily

Sam

5

Well I only have one Vero4k, and it’s “in production” let us say.

I’d like to muck about with the arm64 dev keychain but I am just not grasping the whole keychain concept, so I don’t wanna muck-about on my actual Vero4k, but if I had an emulator I can trial and error it until I understand how it all works.

Am I overthinking this?

6

Did you mean to say toolchain?

There’s this article that talks about “Emulating ARM64 on Linux”. Worth looking at.

Then there’s this: “KVM Virtualization for ARMv8 Architectures”. Seems like it might provide something useful.

Your VM environment is unlikely to have the hardware-specific features of a Vero 4K, but it might help you get a better understanding of certain features of OSMC, if that’s what you want.

7

sudo apt-get install aarch64-toolchain-osmc

However as explained before, we use an armv7 userland on Vero 4K, so you’re better off using the native tools

8

Yes, you told me this once before but I don’t know what it “means”. :slight_smile:

The whole toolchain concept is alien to me. So will running this basically create a new new “root directory” or will it overwrite the existing “userland” (another term I don’t fully grasp yet).

You’re a busy guy so I don’t expect you to answer these questions, which is why I was hopeful for a dev environment that I could “play around” on.

I’m out of work right now so I’m in one of those situation where I have time, but not money to buy a new device. :blush:

9

You don’t need a new device.

Basically, yes.

It will give you /opt/osmc/aarch64-toolchain-osmc

You can then chroot /opt/osmc/aarch64-toolchain-osmc and have fun in it. Nothing will break outside of this. If you break your chroot environment, you can type

exit
sudo apt-get --reinstall aarch64-toolchain-osmc

And it’s like new.

10

GOTCHA! Excellent, thanks!

Guess I’m just too old school to believe it’d be that easy. :wink: