Packer errors with qemu-system-aarch64

Question

I have some success creating Vagrant base boxes with Packer for x86 and x86_64 guests, including VirtualBox, VMware, and qemu hypervisors. Now, I want to start making ARM guests with Packer and qemu, but I am not sure how to resolve the error that I am getting.

Configuration:

https://github.com/mcandre/packer-templates/tree/issue-153

Trace:

$ packer build debian-arm64.json
...
qemu-system-aarch64 \
"-cdrom" \
"/home/andrew/go/src/github.com/mcandre/packer-templates/debian/packer_cache/2a6f0986fb423f739b50f89f0d4905752bcac8eb.iso" \
"-drive" \
"file=output-qemu/debian-arm64,if=virtio,cache=writeback,discard=ignore,format=qcow2" \
"-m" \
"1024" \
"-boot" \
"once=d" \
"-name" \
"debian-arm64" \
"-netdev" \
"user,id=user.0,hostfwd=tcp::2406-:22" \
"-device" \
"virtio-net,netdev=user.0" \
"-machine" \
"type=virt,accel=tcg" \
"-display" \
"sdl" \
"-vnc" \
"127.0.0.1:34"
...
qemu-system-aarch64: no function defined to set boot device list for this architecture

Any tips for resolving this error? Unfortunately, there aren't too many ARM examples for Packer posted online quite yet.

Answer 1

I got far with:

  "type": "qemu",
  "format": "raw",
  "qemu_binary": "qemu-system-arm",
  "qemuargs": [ [ "-machine", "virt" ],
                [ "-device", "virtio-gpu-pci" ],
                [ "-boot", "strict=off" ]],

Nigh, the guest display was not coming up.

The qemu engineers mentioned that, though:

https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/ARM