Re: [Question] Can I start qemu-system-aarch64 with a vmlinux(ELF format)?

[Peter Maydell]

On Thu, 29 Feb 2024 at 03:01, Kunkun Jiang <jiangkunkun@huawei.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> On 2024/2/27 23:28, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Tue, 27 Feb 2024 at 14:42, Kunkun Jiang via <qemu-devel@nongnu.org> 
> > wrote:
> >> Hi everybody,
> >>
> >> I want to start qemu-system-aarch64 with a vmlinux,
> >> which is an ELF format file. The arm_load_elf() is
> >> implemented in arm_setup_direct_kernel_boot(). So I
> >> thought it was supporting the ELF format file.
> > No, you can't do this. The hw/arm/boot.c code assumes
> > that ELF files are "bare metal" binaries, whereas
> > uImage format, AArch64 Image format, and raw binary files
> > are Linux kernels. Only the last three kinds of files will
> > be started with the boot protocol the Linux kernel expects.
> >
> > For AArch64, pass the -kernel option the path to the Image
> > file, not the vmlinux file.
>
> Yes, it works fine using Image files.
> I would also like to ask again, is it because AArch64 does not
> support vmlinux, or is it because qemu does not implement
> this capability?

As I said, it is because QEMU assumes that ELF files are
bare metal images, not Linux kernel images.

-- PMM