Linaro provides open source software for ARM SoCs. Linaro Qemu is a custom version of Qemu that supports the BeagleBoard-xM. Linaro Qemu currently only supports python 2. If you have both python 2 and 3 installed, you may have to specify the path to python by adding the configure argument –python=/usr/bin/python2.

$ cd $HOME
$ git clone git://git.linaro.org/qemu/qemu-linaro.git linaro
$ cd linaro
$ sudo apt-get build-dep qemu # to install the build dependencies of qemu
$ ./configure --target-list=arm-softmmu --prefix=$HOME/qemu
$ make
$ make install

Now you have a QEMU in $HOME/qemu/bin/qemu-system-arm and can test a BeagleBoard-xM build on qemu by running:

# $HOME/qemu/bin/qemu-system-arm  -M beaglexm -drive if=sd,cache=writeback,file=minix_arm_sd.img -clock unix -serial stdio -device usb-kbd -device usb-mouse -usb

If you run into problems booting Minix with Linaro Qemu current, try QEMU emulator version 1.3.0 (qemu-linaro 2012.12). It is known to work with Minix current.

For reference: this page used to advise checking out an older version of qemu-linaro. This is no longer necessary; in fact, building the older version now no longer works on modern system. The qemu-linaro commit we previously recommended checking out was 72f7eb07b611766298fe2dc140533a0a6256b054.