Category:QEMU

It is possible to run postmarketOS installations inside a virtual machine with.

Usage
Install pmbootstrap and initialize it with one of the  devices. For each CPU architecture that is supported in postmarketOS, there is a separate qemu "device". As CPU emulation is slow, pick your native architecture (most likely qemu-amd64 or qemu-aarch64). The differences and what works for each architecture is listed on the device specific wiki pages (see the end of this category page for a full list). The wiki page you are reading here has information about everything that is in common for the QEMU device ports.

Build an image and run QEMU:

The  parameter will increase the image size to 2GB, so you don't instantly run out of space (by default the image size is as small as possible). Check out  for more options. For example the default memory allocation is only 1024, which may not be enough for modern desktop environments.

Network
Qemu's user mode network stack is used. With all UIs except for, postmarketOS should run a DHCP client on boot that automatically connects to QEMU's DNS server and as a result you should have network available. Note that ICMP (ping) may not work depending on your host (see QEMU's documentation for details).

If you selected  as user interface and don't have network, do one of the following:

a) Select the UI  instead. It is slightly bigger and will automatically start a DHCP client.

b) Use.

c) Run Alpine's setup tools in the TTY prompt to generate a  file for   and bring up   manually:

Audio
Audio is disabled by default. To enable audio, select an audio backend (usually  for PulseAudio or   for ALSA), and pass:

Rootfs location
You could find the postmarketOS rootfs image at.

SSH
The default ssh port is 2222. You can access the running QEMU session by.

For file transfer, sftp can be used. The port needs to be passed by an uppercase P:.