Raspberry Pi QEMU Fedora 29 (solved)
If you're here it's because you're tearing your hair out trying to get past the timeouts and "no disk attached" error when running ARM32 images under QEMU on an Intel host machine.
Essentially this is a new known bug which, at release time, wasn't considered to be a show stopper (but you're blocked - right?). It's been deemed to not be a show stopper because you can do the following to make it work (but it's not documented anywhere, hence this page).
You're most likely following this (or something very similar):
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F28/Installation#For_Versatile_Express_Emulation_with_QEMU
and the result is:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1633328
The only way around this is to add the mystical command option:
--qemu-commandline=' -machine highmem=off'
Commandline install of the VM is the only option with a spec like so:
#!/bin/bash
virt-install \
--name Fedora-minimal-armhfp-29 \
--ram 2048 \
--arch armv7l \
--import \
--os-variant fedora29 \
--qemu-commandline='-machine highmem=off' \
--disk /var/lib/libvirt/images/Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-29-1.2-sda.raw \
--boot kernel=/var/lib/libvirt/images/vmlinuz-4.18.16-300.fc29.armv7hl,initrd=/var/lib/libvirt/images/initramfs-4.18.16-300.fc29.armv7hl.img,kernel_args="console=ttyAMA0 rw root=LABEL=_/ rootwait"
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