Host VMs on your Raspberry Pi with qemu

Background

I’ve had great success using qemu on my x86_64 machines hosting various Windows servers, development environments etc. After some research Raspberry Pi does support kvm, though most of the solutions out there use libvirt which is nice but I prefer something a bit more bare bones.

Testing was done on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.5 with 8Mb of memory running Raspbian OS/Debian 12.
This solution even works (rather well!) over ssh with X11 forwarding.
This will support the aarch64 (arm64) architecture natively using KVM.
This example will install the latest version of Debian as a VM. Yes you can use any OS that supports aarch64 (arm64) & uefi.

Install qemu

sudo apt-get install qemu-system-arm

Download the Debian ISO installer

wget "https://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/mini.iso"

Create your hard disk image

qemu-img create -f qcow2 debian.qcow2 50G

Create debian-qemu.sh

#!/bin/bash

exec qemu-system-aarch64 -machine virt,accel=kvm -cpu host -m 1G  \
    -bios /usr/share/qemu-efi-aarch64/QEMU_EFI.fd \
    -display gtk,grab-on-hover=on,zoom-to-fit=off \
    -device virtio-gpu-pci \
    -device qemu-xhci -device usb-kbd -device usb-tablet \
    -drive if=virtio,format=qcow2,file=debian.qcow2 \
    -cdrom mini.iso

Start your VM!

bash ./debian-qemu.sh

Notes

On first run (since the disk image is blank) it should boot off of the CD image (mini.iso). Once the disk image has a bootable OS on it, it should default to that.
qemu -boot order command does not work with the non x86 bios. Press F2 at the UEFI boot screen for options.
In this example efi secure boot is disabled, therefore Windows 11 will be challenging (….).
As a temporary measure if the video doesn’t work install seabios and use -device ramfb. This should help get you through some installations.

Created: 2025-10-15

Modified: 2025-10-15