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AVATT/OpenVZ

Hello,

As I promised in my previous post, the OpenVZ support is getting usable. I have a coreboot ROM image containing a payload consisting of a Linux kernel, the OpenVZ tools vzctl and vzquota, along with uClibc and busybox.

To test this stuff, you need to download the ROM image from here along with the qemu VGA BIOS. Put both of them in the same directory (let's say ~/BIOS) and just run qemu like this:

qemu -L ~/BIOS -hda /dev/zero

You can see the tools are there, but In order for it to be really useful you need a disk image containing an OpenVZ template. I haven't created such an Image yet, but stay tuned, soon i'll post a link to such an image.

Cristi

Some news about the AVATT BIOS

Hello,

It's been a long time since my last post... many happened in the meanwhile, but I almost forgot about this blog.

This time I'll talk again about my progress on the AVATT project, at whichI worked ever since last summer's GSoC. I got it built with KVM support (using buildrom), and I achieved starting an OpenBSD ISO image inside it. Soon after the boot, the image crashes with a strange error message, caused by missing Thread Local Storage(TLS) support from uClibc. The image also contains busybox and ncurses, and its compressed size is just a bit under 2MBytes.

Since the uClibc developers haven't yet developed TLS support (and think I'm not yet ready to do it myself), I decided to move on to another virtualization software, namely OpenVZ. To ease my work - which previously suffered from buildrom's way of compiling the coreboot payload, that is not a cross-compiling toolchain so everything was made to compile using hackish compiler flags - I also decided to switch to a real toolchain, namely Buildroot. This eases a lot the process of compiling a Linux userland payload, making a lot easier the lives of those who want to make something similar to LBDistro.

So, now I'm working on porting AVATT to OpenVZ. I currently have a ROM image containing a kernel patched with OpenVZ support, and I'm working on the vzctl port to buildroot. See the AVATT wiki page for more, or maybe you can try it yourself, building it from source.

Stay tuned...there's more to come soon!

Cristi

Today I finished the Cell BEA training held by Duc Vianney and Brian Watt of IBM.
It was a terrific experience and I learned a lot from it. Many thanks to the organizers!

Cristi

Hello,

As part of my GSoC project, I'm working on a coreboot payload that contains a Linux kernel with KVM enabled, and a small userland that will contain KVM-qemu.

Currently I only have the kernel and the userland without KVM-qemu, but I'm working on porting it to uClibc, which seems to lack some things present in glibc that KVM-qemu needs in order to compile and run.

Here you can find what I have by now. To run it, extract both of the .bin files to your home directory and run

qemu -L ~ -hda /dev/null

The code can be seen at http://repo.or.cz/w/kvm-coreboot.git, but it's work in progress
More to follow on this topic...

Cristi

First post

Hello world!

This is my first post on this so called blog...thanks for passing by!
Cristi