QEMU

Espressif maintains a fork of QEMU in espressif/QEMU with the necessary patches to make it work on Espressif chips. See the ESP-specific instructions for running QEMU for instructions on how to build QEMU and emulate projects with it.

Once you have built QEMU, you should have the qemu-system-xtensa file.

Running Your Project Using QEMU

⚠️ Note: Only ESP32 is currently supported, so make sure you are compiling for xtensa-esp32-espidf target.

For running our project in QEMU, we need a firmware/image with bootloader and partition table merged in it. We can use cargo-espflash to generate it:

cargo espflash save-image --chip esp32 --merge <OUTFILE> --release

If you prefer to use espflash, you can achieve the same result by building the project first and then generating image:

cargo build --release
espflash save-image --chip ESP32 --merge target/xtensa-esp32-espidf/release/<NAME> <OUTFILE>

Now, run the image in QEMU:

/path/to/qemu-system-xtensa -nographic -machine esp32 -drive file=<OUTFILE>,if=mtd,format=raw