Can the solo-io plugin work in conjuction with the packer qemu plugin to boot up ARM images?

[shantanoo-desai]

If I understand correctly, ARMv8 images for boards like Raspberry Pi 4 do not have a EFI bootloader system in them rather they use bootloaders like u-boot, secure-boot. The initial device setup on first boot in such cases happens via tools like cloud-init via their respective user-data, meta-data file when placed in the /boot/firmware partition.

However in order to trigger the cloud-init process one actually has to load the image on an SD Card and boot the device to initiate the first boot setup.

In this case, I was thinking whether

can I use solo-io's packer plugin to place the files into the /boot/firmware directory + some other things via chroot and then use the packer qemu plugin to emulate the booting of the created image? The question is what type of output file is generated by solo's plugin? is it considered to be a qcow2 or it is still raw?

Resources

From my research it is possible to boot images on x86_64 host machine and I have been successful to boot an ARMv8 Ubuntu CloudImg on such a host using packer's qemu plugin.

packer-maas ubuntu templates
System Emulation using QEMU RPI4 and EFI