Getting ready

During my career, I worked with tons of different platforms and having one virtual machine for all of them is very complex and really system consuming (especially if we decide to run several of them at the same time!). That's why it can be interesting to have a lightweight system that can execute foreign code on your PC. Of course, this method cannot be used to test a device driver (we need real hardware for that), but we can use it to run a native compiler and/or native userspace code really quickly just in case our embedded platform is not working. Let's see what I'm talking about.

In the Setting up the target machine recipe, regarding the Debian OS installation, we used the chroot command to set up the root's password. This command worked thanks to QEMU; in fact, in the debian-stretch-arm64 directory, we have an ARM64 root filesystem, which can be executed on an x86_64 platform by using QEMU only. It's then clear that, in this manner, we should be able to execute whatever command we'd like and, of course, we will be able to execute the Bash shell as in the next recipe.