knoway

A short list of instructions

I use macports - install latest qemu and qemu-utils.

Download 2024-10-22-raspios-bullseye-armhf.img.xz. Unpack this with Archiver, and mount it as a drive (right click on the newly created .img file). You might need to change your Finder settings to view all drives.

Create a new directory somewhere (for tidiness) and copy initramfs8, kernel8.img, bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb into this new directory.

To use ssh (I presume you do), In Terminal in the mounted bullseye drive (probably at /Volumes/bootfs), run 'touch ssh'. This creates an empty file which signals to raspios to start the ssh server on first boot.

Unmount the bootfs drive in Finder, and copy the bullseye image into your new directory with the other files.

Open a text editor and copy this code to create a file (I called mine rpi.sh). Change permissions to be executable with 'chmod a+x rpi.sh'.

qemu-system-aarch64 \
-machine raspi3b -m 1G -kernel kernel8.img -initrd initramfs8 -dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb \
-sd 2024-10-22-raspios-bullseye-armhf.img \
-cpu cortex-a53 \
-smp 4 \
-append "root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootwait" \
-usb \
-serial stdio \
-usbdevice keyboard \
-usbdevice mouse \
-netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 -device usb-net,netdev=net0

Run this script! You will be able to ssh to the emulated raspi3b at localhost:2222, as well as direct at 10.0.2.15 (default address for first DHCP machine on the QEMU virtual network).

NB You will probably get a warning about the 'Image format was not specified…'. format=raw is meant to solve this after the filename, but it gave me an error. I ignore this warning, YMMV.

Notes

I can't remember the number of sites I went around picking bits and pieces up to make this work. Thanks to all who went before (shoulders of giants &c.). Importantly, it only works with bullseye. It might work with the 64bit version, but I needed the 32bit armhf. There are other solution on macos for 64 bit Arm operating systems. I use UTM for those, but as of May 2025 it does not support armhf.