[Cin] arm emulation on qemu links

[Andrew Randrianasulu]

On Monday, November 15, 2021, <mnieuw at zap.a2000.nl> wrote:

> I got Debian on arm64 working in non-graphical mode. As before, I used
> Fedora_35 and qemu 6.0.1.
>
> My earlier attempts follow web instructions failed, so I decided to do
> it the easy way and use virt-manager.
>
> This is an GUI interface to libvirt; virsh is the cmd line version.
> libvirt is a generic interface to various emulation platforms, like
> qemu in system mode, qemu in user mode, XEN, and libvirt-LXC.
> What these emulator emulate is irrelevant to libvirt, so to answer your
> earlier question, libvirt can handle anything qemu can handle, and that
> includes arm64 (called aarch64). Although virt-manage gave me only two
> architecture choices, but that might be because I only installed those
> two qemu targets.
>
> Anyway, I assumed that both qemu and libvirt with each new release
> have more built-in knowledge of the various emulators, like
> how you set up a cdrom device for iso installs.
> So I used virt-manager to set up a new Debian 11 aarch64 VM.
>
> I downloaded the Debian 11 netinstall (< 320 MB); the one I tried
> previously was 4.4 GB. In virt-manager, I started a new machine,
> qemu/kvm user session, use local install media (the downloaded iso),
> set architecture option to aarch64, gave it extra memory and cpus,
> have it generate virtual disks of 30G (that is the max it will use),
> and then take it from there; I used user-mode networking. Install was
> dead easy, it just worked. It took three hours, surprising little
> network traffic, but that went up to 10 MB/s in places. I selected the
> XCFE desktop, even though I did know that graphical likely would not
> work. Do remember the root password you make.
>
> The slow install is because of the apparent use of single
> thread, not because of network of disk access ( gave the VM 4 cpus and
> 4 G memory). The virtual disk in user mode will end up in
> .local/share/libvirt/images. If you do "ls" there, you'll the the 30G
> disk, but "du" will show the the actual size; in some places, like
> configuring the kernel, the progress on the screen did not change, but
> "du" showed the actual disk growing. Be patient.
> You have to answer some questions now and then, but largely you can do
> other things. At this point, you have a 80x22 screen.
>
> In the end, it rebooted by itself, and I got a working system, inclusive
> network. It was fully up to date too (e.g. during the install a newer
> kernel was installed), and the disk was < 5.4 GB. Do add the user you
> created to the sudoers file, to avoid having to be root many times.
>
> You can start/stop the VM nicely via virt-manager (the "stop" knob at
> the top sends a nice shutdown signal by the looks of it, not just kill
> it), and it also has a built-in viewer for the client. You "open" a VM,
> via "view", select "console" (client screen, can be GUI or character
> based), or "details", where you can visually change VM machine details,
> much like in VirtualBox; but you must enable editing the xml via
> virt-manager edit->preferences.
> If a VM is running, you must click in its console to have it grab
> the keyboard (like any other window), the mouse works seamlessly.
> Anyway, because the VM was not configured with a graphical card, I used
> the "details" view to Add a video card, I tried various types, but
> settled for now on "virtio", that seems to have a driver for it (under
> aarch64). If you then start the VM, you still get a character screen,
> but you can drag it to whatever size you want, which is handy when
> editing or building software.
>
> If you install inxi (apt install inxi), then "inxi -F" will show the
> VM machine details as Debian detected them.
>
> I also added a AC97 sound card to it in the same way, no idea if it
> will work, but inxi shows it is there.
>
> Anyway, with this setup there is a working environment to test cinGG
> arm64 builds. A character-based editor would be handy, maybe "ne".
>
> Hope this helps you with the arm testing.



thanks a lot for detailed writeup! (currently am a bit short on  storage
for trying proot-distro - with normal glibc and such, as opposed to
termux/android bionic libc.)

>
> MatN
>
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