Attempt to Setup KVM VM on RK3399/ARM64 - OS Image
Setting up a KVM virtual machine on an ARM64 platform (RK3399). Guest and host are different flavours of Debian - Armbian stretch and Ubuntu 18.04. Guest kernel is a mainline stable LTS release, not a vendor kernel - as it is does not need the vendor hardware drivers. The aim is to run some NAS setup on the VM to serve an old USB Raid disk - and retire an old Power MacMini that had been doing the job.
Target Guest:
- Armbian build of debian stretch. https://www.armbian.com/
- Linux 4.9 LTS (version indicated by https://wiki.debian.org/DebianStretch).
- Would like to run OMV (https://www.openmediavault.org/).
References:
- OMV on ARM
- KVM setup for x86 https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Tuning_Kernel
What is needed:
- An Kernel Image.gz file.
- A root filesystem image.
What is not needed:
- A device tree - Qemu can generate this for us.
- An initram image. The boot disk drivers (virtio-blk) will be compiled into the kernel.
Kernel Image
As there is no need for vendor drivers, a mainline tree can be used.
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git
git checkout v4.9.164
make defconfig
The defconfig enables most drivers we need by default(CONFIG_PARAVIRT=y, CONFIG_VIRTIO_*). Some optimization can be done, e.g.
- Most Virtio drivers are enabled by default, but these were not enabled:
- HW_RANDOM_VIRTIO (Location : Device Drivers -> Character devices -> Hardware Random Number Generator Core support) “Device Drivers > Virtualization”
- CONFIG_VIRTIO_INPUT is not enabled by default. Not needed for a headless server.
- Remove SoC vendor specific drivers:
- “Platform Selection”
- (Not strictly needed, but the “ARMv8 software model (Versatile Express)” platform can be emulated by QEMU)
- “Platform Selection”
- Removed xen/kvm host options (“Virtualization”, “Kernel Features > Xen guest support on ARM64”)
For this use case, other config options are useful:
- Legacy Filesystems
- The USB raid disk is formatted in HFS (CONFIG_HFS_FS).
- There are older Amiga FFS HD images that should be accessible (CONFIG_AFFS_FS).
Create the kernel image (locally compiled on host):
make vmlinux -j 4
make Image.gz
make defconfig
Copy the image to the vm environment dir.
cp arch/arm64/boot/Image.gz /vm/armbian/Image.4.9.164.gz
cp defconfig /vm/armbian/defconfig.4.9.164.gz
Root Filesystem
Using a raw filesystem image, formatted for ext4. This is the simplest, other options can be created with qemu-img
dd if=/dev/zero conv=sparse of=rootfs.img bs=1G count=8
mkfs.ext4 rootfs.img
mkdir rootfs
sudo mount -o loop rootfs.img rootfs
The Armbian rootfs image is here. Downloaded and extracted to the loop mounted rootfs image:
wget https://dl.armbian.com/_rootfs/stretch-ng-arm64.65f8bb574253c9bcf68fbd09876b7485.tar.lz4
sudo apt-get install liblz4-tool
cd rootfs/
lz4cat ../stretch-ng-arm64.65f8bb574253c9bcf68fbd09876b7485.tar.lz4 | sudo tar px
cd ..
Setup an account and password:
sudo chroot rootfs
root@Firefly-RK3399:/# useradd xxxx
root@Firefly-RK3399:/# passwd xxxx
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
usermod -G sudo xxxx
exit
The next step is to setup QEMU/KVM.
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