cloud-hypervisor/docs/arm64.md

How to build and run Cloud-hypervisor on AArch64

Cloud-hypervisor is partially enabled on AArch64 architecture. Although all features are not ready yet, you can begin to test Cloud-hypervisor on a AArch64 host by following this guide.

Prerequisites

On AArch64 machines, Cloud-hypervisor depends on an external library libfdt-dev for generating Flattened Device Tree (FDT).

The long-term plan is to replace libfdt-dev with some pure-Rust component to get rid of such dependency.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libfdt-dev

Build

Before building, a hack trick need to be performed to get rid of some build error in vmm component. See this for more info about this temporary workaround.

sed -i 's/"with-serde",\ //g' hypervisor/Cargo.toml

For Virtio devices, you can choose MMIO or PCI as transport option.

MMIO

cargo build --no-default-features --features mmio,kvm

PCI

Using PCI devices requires GICv3-ITS for MSI messaging. GICv3-ITS is very common in modern servers, but your machine happen to be old ones with GICv2(M) (like Raspberry Pi 4) or GICv3 without ITS, MMIO can still work.

cargo build --no-default-features --features pci,kvm

Image

Download kernel binary and rootfs image from AWS.

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/spec.ccfc.min/img/aarch64/ubuntu_with_ssh/fsfiles/xenial.rootfs.ext4 -O rootfs.ext4
wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/spec.ccfc.min/img/aarch64/ubuntu_with_ssh/kernel/vmlinux.bin -O kernel.bin

Containerized build

If you want to build and test Cloud Hypervisor without having to install all the required dependencies, you can also turn to the development script: dev_cli.sh.

To build the development container:

./scripts/dev_cli.sh build-container

To build Cloud-hypervisor in the container: (The default option for Virtio transport is MMIO.)

./scripts/dev_cli.sh build

Run

Assuming you have built Cloud-hypervisor with the development container, a VM can be started with command:

sudo build/cargo_target/aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/debug/cloud-hypervisor --kernel kernel.bin --disk path=rootfs.ext4 --cmdline "keep_bootcon console=hvc0 reboot=k panic=1 pci=off root=/dev/vda rw" --cpus boot=4 --memory size=512M --serial file=serial.log --log-file log.log -vvv

If the build was done out of the container, replace the binary path with target/debug/cloud-hypervisor.