How to load a mender qemu image in virtualbox?

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Mirza’s tutorial QEMU, the FAST! processor emulator (Ubuntu) explains how to boot the generated image with qemu well and it works flawlessly. Now i’m trying to port this to Virtualbox. I hesitated posting about it on this forum as this is not directly Mender related, but since the vmdk file works on Virtualbox without Mender (I also tested), I think it can interest many people.

The qemu command I use, based on mender-qemu script:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -m 512M \
    -drive file=ovmf.qcow2,if=pflash,format=qcow2,unit=0,readonly=on \
    -drive file=ovmf.vars.qcow2,if=pflash,format=qcow2,unit=1 \
    -nographic \
    -drive file=file.uefiimg,if=ide,format=raw

QEMU image is great for development but the motive is to ship the VM to customers in a one file format on a software that is well known by customers in general, hence Virtualbox.
Yocto can also provide a “wic.vmdk” image but in this case it is not “mender compatible” as only the uefiimg generated by Mender works (along with the bios one).

I read that it seems possible to convert a qemu image to a raw image, then to a vdi (http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/node/37) but the bootloader image and data are in separate files.

Edit:
I converted the uefiimg to a vdi and added as hard drive under a “Controller: AHCI”, the image boots as you can see here: https://imgur.com/a/0jOednl but then, constant black screen.
Command I used to convert:
VBoxManage convertfromraw file.uefiimg --format vdi file.vdi

Thanks

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Hi @dbensoussan one possibility is to use the HDDIMG file. It is setup with a grub entry for “install” that will write the uefiimg to a second storage device. It’s not a single step but may work for you.

Note that I have not tried this with the QEMU machine types or with Virtualbox so there may be issues but it should be doable.

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Thanks @drewmoseley. Ironic, but I actually just had to wait, the image boots after around 15 seconds of black screen. (Great things happpen when fetching a tea :wink: )

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