RK3588 SBC QEMU Hypervisor with ZFS on Debian: A Deep Dive

This article details setting up a QEMU hypervisor on a BananaPi M71 2 (RK3588) single-board computer using Armbian and ZFS for storage. The author walks through building a custom Armbian image, flashing it, preparing NVMe SSD storage with a ZFS zpool, installing libvirtd, and finally running virtual machines. Challenges with NVMe drive compatibility on the RK3588 are addressed, along with solutions. The end result is a functional, small-scale private cloud capable of running various VMs (web servers, databases, etc.) offering workload isolation and resource management.