[virt-tools-list] Emulating raspberry pi (arm1136-r2) in virt-manager?

[Martin Kletzander]

On 02/15/2013 11:46 AM, Simon Lambourn wrote:
> 
> On 15/02/13 09:11, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>> On 02/14/2013 09:01 PM, Cole Robinson wrote:
>>> On 02/14/2013 09:26 AM, Simon Lambourn wrote:
>>>> Hi,  I'm sure I am not the only person to want to do this:
>>>>
>>>> I can emulate raspberry pi using their disk image using raw
>>>> qemu-system-arm,
>>>> but I cannot find the right CPU machine type in virt-manager.  Has
>>>> anyone
>>>> found how to do this, or can someone offer advice please?
>>>>
>>>> The command I have used to start the raspberry pi emulation (on
>>>> Ubuntu 12.10) is
>>>>
>>>> qemu-system-arm -kernel kernel-qemu -cpu arm1136-r2 -m 192 -M
>>>> versatilepb
>>>> -no-reboot -serial stdio -append "root=/dev/sda2 panic=1" -hda
>>>> debian6-17-02-2012.img
>>>>
>>>> I downloaded the debian6...img file from the raspberry pi site. This
>>>> all works
>>>> fine but I would like to set up a VM definition in virt-manager if
>>>> possible.
>>>> In the dialog to create a new virtual machine I selected "import
>>>> existing OS
>>>> image" and then on screen 4 "customise configuration before
>>>> install", virt
>>>> type=qemu and architecture = arm.   Then I press Finish to customise
>>>> the
>>>> configuration.    In Overview I select Machine type = versatilepb
>>>> (and in Disk
>>>> type I select disk bus=IDE and storage format=Raw, but I'm not sure
>>>> this is
>>>> important).
>>>>
>>>> However I can't find where or how to enter the cpu type - on the
>>>> processor
>>>> page I have tried setting Model (under configuration) to arm1136, 1136,
>>>> arm1136-r2 and none of these are accepted by qemu. If I leave the
>>>> Model type
>>>> blank I get a different error (HDA full duplex not supported by this
>>>> binary).
>>>>
>>> libvirt + qemu-system-arm don't play together too well at the moment.
>>> I don't
>>> think you will be able to do what you want to do without some qemu
>>> wrapper
>>> script. There's some hints here:
>>>
>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu#Using_QEMU_with_libvirt
>>>
>>>
>>> The plan is to make this all 'just work' in libvirt + virt-manager,
>>> but no
>>> time table yet.
>>>
>>> - Cole
>>>
>> Just confirming what Cole said; we tried to achieve something similar
>> few days ago.  The thing is, though, that libvirt supports mainly
>> emulating PCs in QEMU.  There are many things that aren't very easily
>> fixable.  Completely different devices must be specified in some
>> scenarios and some QEMU versions even expect different parameters when
>> running arm emulation (for the same options as the PC emulation).
>> Controllers are different, there is no PCI bus, but libvirt
>> automatically adds that and many many more things.
>>
>> As suggested, the best way to make it work is try to make it "just work"
>> and don't expect too much.  There are many wrappers on the interwebz you
>> can use, two of them are in the link above.
>>
>> Either you know that already or you'll learn that when reading the first
>> howto, but to briefly explain how that works; there is '<emulator>'
>> element in libvirt's domain XML and that says what binary (script)
>> should be used to run that particular machines.  You can create your
>> script, put it there and just make sure in the script that you mangle
>> the command-line enough so QEMU will start when you exec() it at the
>> end.  The less you change it, the more you may get out of it (networking
>> and such).
>>
>> My 0.02$,
>> Martin
>>
> Martin & Cole - thank you for the advice and pointers.    I have made
> some progress but I'm now stuck again.
> 
> From what you say above, it seems that virt-manager is unlikely to allow
> definition of a raspberry pi in the near future, but it may be possible
> using libvirt/virsh.
> 
> Following the link above led me to an xml definition for an arm machine,
> which I copied and changed to match the qemu-system-arm command string
> (above) that worked for me.   When I try and start this VM I get an
> error:  "error: unsupported configuration: CPU specification not
> supported by hypervisor".  The CPU element I'm using is
> 
>   <cpu match='exact'> <model>arm1136-r2</model>   </cpu>
> 
> The guidance says that valid CPU models are in the cpu_map.xml file, but
> this only seems to cover the X86 architecture.   So is there another way
> of specifying the model in the XML file?    I'm looking to replicate the
> qemu-system-arm parameter -cpu arm1136-r2.
> 
> Any ideas would be welcome.
> Simon
> 

Unfortunately, that's another thing that must be taken care of in the
wrapper :(  There are t2o problems with that:
 1) Command 'qemu-system-arm -cpu ?' has different output than
'qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu ?', hence libvirt is unable to parse it.
 2) libvirt has it's own cpu definitions (in the file you mentioned)
that has (again) only PC-related CPUs.

Specifying for example 'Westmere' and then doing something like sed
's/-cpu Westmere/-cpu arm1136-r2/' in the wrapper might help (probably
will need a bit of tweaking).

Martin