[virt-tools-list] virt-install command line for installing Fedora 21 guest on aarch64

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I was able to get some way into the install using the following
command line:

virt-install \
  -n f21 \
  --machine=virt \
  --cpu=host \
  --vcpus=1 \
  -r 2048 \
  --os-variant=fedora20 \
  --disk path=/dev/vg_ssd/f21,bus=virtio \
  -l *see below* \
  -x 'console=ttyAMA0 earlyprintk=pl011,0x9000000 ignore_loglevel'

Notes:

* --machine=virt is required: See my previous post on this mailing list.

* bus=virtio: You must use this because IDE (the default) is not
  available on ARM.  I couldn't work out how to use virtio-scsi, which
  would be my preferred choice.

* console=ttyAMA0: This is the serial console (PL011) which qemu -M
  virt emulates.  There is no graphical display AFAIK.

* earlyprintk=pl011,0x9000000: This enables early kernel messages,
  which can be very useful.  "pl011,0x9000000" tells it to write the
  messages directly out to the PL011 serial port at the fixed
  memory-mapped address 0x9000000.

Finally about the location (-l flag): Unfortunately there are no
composes of Fedora for aarch64.  In other words there is no location
URL where virt-install can download the pxeboot kernel & initramfs
which it uses to net-install a guest.  [Peter: Am I right about this?]

We happen to have one internally at Red Hat which I'm using for
testing, but that's not at a public URL unfortunately, and also it has
a broken kernel that doesn't have all the patches required to run
under virt.

Also: I have patched my copy of qemu with this not-upstream-yet patch:

http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/375937/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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