Building QEMU 8.0 on Raspberry Pi OS

Introduction

Another passing year brings the 8th major release of the incredibly versatile emulation platform QEMU.

As always, the fastest, simplest way to get QEMU onto Raspberry Pi OS is via the default package manager. Unfortunately, version 5.2 – the version currently offered via the package manager – is almost 3 years out of date and an awful lot of development has occurred since.

Fortunately building QEMU 8.0 is not that difficult.

QEMU in the Raspberry Pi OS package manager…

…alas the offered version is incredibly out of date!

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Building QEMU 7.0 on Raspberry Pi OS

***NEW: Building QEMU 8.0 on Raspberry Pi OS***

The Introduction

And spring 2022 brings us another major release of QEMU – in this case, QEMU 7.0, available in all of its tar.xz’d loveliness directly from qemu.org.

Whilst the Raspberry Pi OS‘s package repository remains the fastest, simplest way to get QEMU onto your Pi, Pi OS’s Debian lineage often leaves it trailing the cutting edge – in the case of QEMU, the packaged release for Raspberry Pi OS (version 2022-04-04) is version 5.2 from way back in December 2020.

QEMU can be installed via the Raspberry Pi OS package manager – or via ‘apt install’ on the command line. Alas, the version offered is several years behind the latest release.

Fortunately, QEMU is fairly easy to download and compile ourselves.

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