Is there a Boxes alternative with RISC-V emulation?

I was using GNOME Boxes so far, but I’m annoyed of it’s limitations. It doesn’t seem to support RISC-V (or anything but x86) emulation, although QEMU does, it can’t scale up screen image if it’s too small, and I can’t allocate less than 64 MiB of RAM to an OS to test the boundaries of really small systems.

Is there a piece of VM software with no such limitations?

I can’t install VirtualBox because it asked me to recompile the kernel with a certain parameter, I never succeeded in compiling even most simple software, I’m not risking my kernel.

Can you clarify the line re kernel parameter?

VirtualBox uses kernel modules that the akmods system recompiles for you, that should work as-is on F40’s kernel config, you can always unload (rmmod) a kernel module. It gets slightly more complex with secure boot, is that the case?
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/VirtualBox

As for qemu, it has documented support for RISC-V Documentation/Platforms/RISCV - QEMU

I haven’t tried this myself though (only virtualbox +_ 6 months ago), so not sure if this will be of help

1 Like

If you install VirtualBox from rpmfusion this is not an issue, unlike installing directly from Oracle. The rpmfusion route manages compiling the kernel modules needed for you in the background.

# dnf list VirtualBox
Last metadata expiration check: 2:06:18 ago on Sat 21 Sep 2024 10:26:07 AM CDT.
Available Packages
VirtualBox.x86_64                                        7.0.20-1.fc40                                        rpmfusion-free-updates

This route does not modify the kernel in any way, since it only compiles a module needed as the driver for VB.

First enable the rpmfusion repos as shown at Configuration - RPM Fusion then install VB as shown at Howto - RPM Fusion

1 Like