[Buildroot] Creating a filesystem for QEMU

[Chris Packham]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 9:23 AM, Bogdan Cristea <cristeab at gmail.com> wrote:
>    I am trying to use QEMU for development of embedded systems using Real
> Time Linux. Buildroot seems to be the tool I need, but I still don't know how
> to build a disk image recognized by QEMU. Right now I am trying to use only
> x86 and x86_64 architectures.
>    Does anyone know how to build a file system usable in QEMU ?
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I've just started doing the same thing myself.  After a bit of googling
the trick I found was to ask buildroot to generate a cpio target file
system. Start with the i386_defconfig or i686_defconfig and set
BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_CPIO=y (or use "make menuconfig" an find the cpio
option under the "Target file system" menu)

Making use of qemus ability to replace the bootloader you can invoke
qemu with

   qemu -kernel output/images/bzImage \
        -initrd output/images/rootfs.i686.cpio