Requirements

This guide assumes QEMU is already installed, there are numerous guides available online how to do this on macOS. In the example below the files AAVMF_CODE.fd and AAVMF_VARS.fd (part of QEMU) and clavister-cos-core-14.00.00.12-kvm-armv8-uefi.qcow2 (downloaded from MyClavister) are copied into a folder that will host all files needed for cOS Core.

Running cOS Core 14.00 using QEMU

The following command line will start a virtual machine with 2 GB of ram, it will use QEMUs built in SLIRP based networking backend and forward port 8080 on 127.0.0.1 to port 80 on cOS Core. 

Note: SLRIP based network in slow and should only be used for testing purposes, if good network performance is needed, see https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Networking

qemu-system-aarch64 \
    -display none \
    -M virt-2.12 -cpu host -machine accel=hvf,highmem=off -m 2048 \
    -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=AAVMF_CODE.fd,readonly=on \
    -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=AAVMF_VARS.fd \
    -drive file=clavister-cos-core-14.00.00.12-kvm-armv8-uefi.qcow2,format=qcow2,if=none,id=vda \
    -device virtio-blk-device,drive=vda \
    -netdev user,id=n1,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:8080-0.0.0.0:80 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=n1 \
    -serial stdio

Related articles