These are the requirements for the development environment: Hosted Mender is recommended for ease of use and application updates, but a self hosted server might be better if you are planning to do many full rootfs updates, since they use a lot of bandwidth. Difficult or impossible to test special hardware, such as sensorsĮither a Hosted Mender account or a self hosted Mender server.Conversely, some problems may only manifest themselves in a Virtual Machine.Not all problems on a real device will manifest themselves in a Virtual Machine.

You can use your usual development setup, no need to visit the hardware labīut there are also some disadvantages, and using QEMU is not a replacement for all device testing:.

Better performance (QEMU has access to your workstation CPU and memory).

No waiting to write an image to an SD card.

No fiddling with cables or memory cards to run on a device.

What are the advantages of using QEMU instead of a device? The Mender Debian based build environment will be used as a basis for this tutorial. The article will go through both advantages and disadvantages when using a QEMU Virtual Machine instead of a real device. The goal is to enable rapid development, and the target audience is developers, with a focus on ease of use. This article will be a step-by-step tutorial on how to do virtual Mender deployments using the QEMU virtualized environment, as an alternative to using an actual x86 device. Running on real devices can often be tedious, time consuming and in some cases may be impractical. But that does not mean that development and testing necessarily has to happen this way.

Before shipping software for embedded devices, it is crucial to test it on real devices, in an environment as close to the actual operating environment as possible.

Qemu basic tutorial