Re: OS porting on Xen on ARM

[Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com>]

On 12/17/2013 12:44 PM, Simon Martin wrote:
> Good luck Arianna.
>  
> When I started my micro-pv implementation it took me a long time to get anything
> to run. It eventually ended up being that I hadn't set the XEN_INTERFACE macro
> in the makefile. Please don't get caught out by that one! The rest was reading
> the mini-os code, the documentation, web search engines, and asking questions on
> this mail list.

Thank you for the hint, that must have been a nasty pitfall. I'll definitely
check out the mini-os code and the online documentation.


>  
> Regards.
>  
>  
> On 17/12/2013 08:05:45, "Dario Faggioli" <dario.faggioli@citrix.com
> <mailto:dario.faggioli@citrix.com>> wrote:
>  
>> Hi Arianna!
>>  
>> First of all, some context for the Xen on ARM people that I'm Cc-ing.
>> Arianna will be working on porting an embedded --targeted specifically
>> at automotive-- OS on top of Xen on ARM. The OS is Erika, and Claudio
>> could give any kind of information about it (and correct me, if I said
>> something wrong):
>> http://wiki.automotive.linuxfoundation.org/index.php/Erika_Enterprise_Open-Source_RTOS
>>
>> http://erika.tuxfamily.org/
>>  
>> This mail is mainly meant at giving her some clues and pointers about
>> how to get on with it. I'll do my best but, given it's ARM, with which
>> I'm not super familiar with, feel free to chime in and fill the gaps or
>> correcting the mistakes I may make.
>>  
>> The goal is (for now) to have the Erika OS running as a DomU, on top of
>> a Linux Dom0. She'll be using a Cubie* as a platform. There is
>> definitely some similar/related activity going on (writing/porting
>> embedded OSes on Xen) these days, but, if I'm not mistaken, this would
>> be the first example of doing it on ARM (except, perhaps, from Julien's
>> work on FreeBSD, but that's not embedded! :-P)... Pretty cool, eh?
>>  
>> Arianna, all the information about running Xen on Allwinner is here:
>> http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_ARM_with_Virtualization_Extensions/Allwinner
>> Also, there is a thread right about this on xen-devel going on in these.
>> Perhaps you can have a look at it:
>> http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/mid/%3CWC20131216075445.88000B@perkbv.com%3E
>> (look at the whole thread, e.g., via marc.info).
>>  
>> About Xen in embedded in general, there has been a thread recently,
>> which may contain some useful info. In case you want to skim through it,
>> here it is:
>> http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/mid/%3C1384802050.16918.219.camel@Solace%3E
>>  
>> About how a small, and an hopefully easy enough to understand, OS that
>> runs as a Xen DomU looks like, check out Mini-OS in the Xen Source tree:
>> http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=tree;f=extras/mini-os;hb=HEAD
>> As I said, it's small, and definitely simpler, for instance, than Linux,
>> but it's quite feature complete, which is something you probably won't
>> need.
>>  
>> In fact, there are people working on even smaller and simpler solutions,
>> for the most diverse purposes. Some links below (again, check the entire
>> threads):
>> http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/mid/%3Cem4158cadd-9eab-4a26-80ba-b3a3b311bee2@smartin-alien%3E
>>
>> http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/mid/%3Cem40e5807b-ac20-4c2a-ad66-d1056397e07b@smartin-alien%3E
>>
>> http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/mid/%3Cembc004940-1dbb-4924-bbab-76901c75e44e@smartin-alien%3E
>>
>> http://osdir.com/ml/general/2013-12/msg26912.html
>> http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/mid/%3C723A93B1-0345-42C6-949B-F6070CE40043@recoil.org%3E
>>
>>  
>> Simon also sent the code out already, here:
>> https://github.com/FurryFuttock/micro-pv
>> For anything about MirageOS: http://openmirage.org/ , https://github.com/mirage/
>>  
>> In case you need something bigger, Julien ported FreeBSD on Xen on ARM
>> (as a DomU). That lives here (Julien, correct me if I'm wrong):
>> http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=people/julieng/freebsd.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/xen-arm
>>
>> I expect this to be super-overkill, but perhaps it could help to get an
>> idea of what an actual port (rather than a 'write from scratch') would
>> require.
>>  
>> Last but not least, the hypercall interface official documentation is
>> all in the public header files, in the repository, as well as here:
>> http://xenbits.xen.org/docs/unstable-staging/hypercall/index.html
>> http://xenbits.xen.org/docs/unstable-staging/hypercall/arm/index.html
>>  
>> That is all for now I guess... Ask if there is anything you do not
>> understand that you think this community could help with. :-)
>>  
>> Best Regards,
>> Dario
>>  
>> -- 
>> <<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>> Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
>> Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)
>>  


-- 
/*
 * Arianna Avanzini
 * avanzini.arianna@gmail.com
 * 73628@studenti.unimore.it
 */