On the other hand, it has different goals and is just meant to load a blob of instructions over ethernet (faster evaluation cycle) not an entire Linux kernel with all the POSIX / UNIX stuff from SD. So you have far more control but are also on a lower level, somewhat like developing for a more powerful Arduino.
Qemu usermode emulation is nice, but the full-hardware emulation is way more interesting. Eg. in https://github.com/dpc/titanos - toy kernel for Aarch64 written in our lord-and-saviour programming language: Rust, I use Qemu to run kernel and unittests for that kernel. With Qemu gdb stubs it's like having a software-defined hardware platform with a JTAG debugger attached. `make run` and it runs - no need to plug cables and press reset buttons.
[1] https://www.pine64.org/ (I'm not related to Pine, just a satisfied user)
To me it was sill more attractive than the Ordroid-U3 with its Samsung chip, which boots only signed software and is totally undocumented. Same with the PI3 and its GPU code, which is needed to boot.
hey, you can use Nexus 5x, 6p or Pixel phones! I've been meaning to write a blog post about this.
