Getting Started with StratoVirt

1. Prepare

• Host os

  You can run StratoVirt on both x86_64 and aarch64 platforms.

  And on top of that, the StratoVirt is based on KVM, so please make sure you have KVM module on your platform.

• Authority

  You should have read/write permissions to /dev/kvm. If not, you can get your permissions by:

  $ sudo setfacl -m u:${USER}:rw /dev/kvm

2. Build StratoVirt from source

2.1 Check rust environment

To build StratoVirt, make sure that Rust language environment and Cargo have already been installed. The recommended version of rustc is 1.42 or later.

$ rustc -version
rustc 1.42.0

If you want to deploy rust environment, the following link will help you:

https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

2.2 Build with musl-libc

With musl-libc, StratoVirt is linked statically and has no library dependencies. It's the default target to build StratoVirt.

# Add musl rust tool-chain, if installed, skip
$ arch=`uname -m`
$ rustup target add ${arch}-unknown-linux-musl

# Build StratoVirt
$ cargo build --release --target ${arch}-unknown-linux-musl

Now you can find StratoVirt binary file in target/${arch}-unknown-linux-musl/release/stratovirt.

2.3 Build with glibc

StratoVirt can also be built using glibc toolchains. By this way, StratoVirt is linked dynamically.

# Add gnu rust tool-chain, if installed, skip
$ arch=`uname -m`
$ rustup target add ${arch}-unknown-linux-gnu

# Build StratoVirt
$ cargo build --release --target ${arch}-unknown-linux-gnu

Now you can find StratoVirt binary file in target/${arch}-unknown-linux-gnu/release/stratovirt.

3. Prepare kernel and rootfs image

3.1 Build kernel

The StratoVirt in current version supports only PE-format kernel images on both x86_64 and aarch64 platforms, which can be built with:

1. Firstly, get the openEuler kernel source code:

   $ git clone https://gitee.com/openeuler/kernel
   $ cd kernel

2. Switch the kernel version to kernel-4.19:

   $ git checkout kernel-4.19

3. Configure your linux kernel. You can use our recommended config and copy it to kernel path as .config. You can also modify config options by:

   $ make menuconfig

4. Build and transform kernel image to PE format.

   $ make -j vmlinux && objcopy -O binary vmlinux vmlinux.bin

3.2 Make rootfs

Rootfs image is a file system image. An EXT4-format image with /sbin/init can be mounted at boot time in StratoVirt. Below is a simple way to make a EXT4 rootfs image:

1. Prepare a properly-sized file(e.g. 1G):

   $ dd if=/dev/zero of=./rootfs.ext4 bs=1G count=20

2. Create an empty EXT4 file system on this file:

   $ mkfs.ext4 ./rootfs.ext4

3. Mount the file image:

   $ mkdir -p /mnt/rootfs
   $ sudo mount ./rootfs.ext4 /mnt/rootfs && cd /mnt/rootfs

4. Get the latest alpine-minirootfs for your platform(e.g. aarch64 3.12.0):

   $ wget http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/releases/aarch64/alpine-minirootfs-3.12.0-aarch64.tar.gz
   $ tar -zxvf alpine-minirootfs-3.12.0-aarch64.tar.gz
   $ rm alpine-minirootfs-3.12.0-aarch64.tar.gz

5. Make a simple /sbin/init for EXT4 file image.

   $ rm sbin/init && touch sbin/init && cat > sbin/init <<EOF
   #! /bin/sh
   mount -t devtmpfs dev /dev
   mount -t proc proc /proc
   mount -t sysfs sysfs /sys
   ip link set up dev lo
   
   exec /sbin/getty -n -l /bin/sh 115200 /dev/ttyS0
   poweroff -f
   EOF
   
   $ sudo chmod +x sbin/init

6. Unmount rootfs image:

   $ cd ~ && umount /mnt/rootfs

4. Run StratoVirt

With kernel and rootfs image, we can boot a guest linux machine by StratoVirt.

4.1 Run with cmdline

The minimum configuration for StratoVirt is:

• A PE format linux kernel
• A rootfs image as virtio-blk device, which has to be added to kernel parameters
• Api-channel to control StratoVirt
• If you want to login with ttyS0, you may need a serial and add ttyS0 to kernel parameters

You can deploy StratoVirt with cmdline arguments:

# Make sure api-channel can be created.
$ rm -f /path/to/socket

# Start StratoVirt
$ ./stratovirt \
    -kernel /path/to/vmlinux.bin \
    -append console=ttyS0 pci=off reboot=k panic=1 root=/dev/vda \
    -drive file=/path/to/rootfs,id=rootfs,readonly=off \
    -api-channel unix:/path/to/socket \
    -serial stdio

4.2 Running with json

StratoVirt can also boot from a json configuration file like provided sample default.json.

# Json configuration file
$ cat default.json
{
  "boot-source": {
    "kernel_image_path": "/path/to/kernel",
    "boot_args": "console=ttyS0 reboot=k panic=1 pci=off tsc=reliable ipv6.disable=1 root=/dev/vda"
  },
  "machine-config": {
    "vcpu_count": 1,
    "mem_size": 268435456
  },
  "drive": [
    {
      "drive_id": "rootfs",
      "path_on_host": "/path/to/rootfs/image",
      "direct": false,
      "read_only": false
    }
  ],
  "serial": {
    "stdio": true
  }
}

# Start StratoVirt
$ ./stratovirt \
    -config ./default.json \
    -api-channel unix:/path/to/socket

You can also run StratoVirt with initrdfs, read initrd_guide.

If you want to know more information on running StratoVirt, go to the Configuration Guidebook.