Re: [MirageOS-devel] Mirage ARM port

[Thomas Leonard <talex5@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10 April 2014 17:27, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 10 Apr 2014, at 16:39, Andy Ray <andy.ray@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been discussing the ARM port of Mirage with Anil recently and
>> would like to get involved helping to bring that up.
>>
>> Initially it would be to target a Raspberry Pi (finally something I
>> can use it for!) but eventually I'm interested in getting it running
>> on an Altera Cyclone V Soc with dual-core ARM Cortex-A9s.
>
> Interesting -- is there a particular dev board that I can get that
> embeds this SoC?
>
>>
>> I understand there are 2 approaches - using a FreeBSD kernel module or
>> building up from scratch with a mini OS and implementing some device
>> drivers.  I'm easy either way.
>>
>> I've never used a BSD but I have hacked a realtime linux OS onto an
>> ARM Soc before so I know there be dragons ahead...
>
> The BSD dragons are far more cuddly than the Linux ones :-)
>
> I'd say that upstreaming the FreeBSD kernel module prototype would be
> a good intermediate step before a full port because:
>
> - it's mostly already there due to Gabor Pali's excellent work last summer.
> - can progressively swap out physical device drivers with OCaml equivalents.
> - good opportunity to tidy up the MiniOS layer and cross-compilation bits
>   before cramming it all into a SoC.
> - can mostly work on x86 (e.g. in a VM) and then swap over to ARM after.
>   I find this easier but the reverse may be true if you're an ARM guru...
> - there's already a good FreeBSD rPi port -- and maybe for the Cyclone?
>
> To figure out how to upstream this properly, we do need to figure out the
> state of the various MiniOS branches.  Thomas Leonard is currently working
> on a Xen/ARM/MiniOS port as a fairly standalone effort, and Hwanju Kim
> is looking at a PVHVM MiniOS port -- both are in early days so far, but
> any comments or trees we should look at?

Here are my notes on getting Xen running on the Cubieboard2:

https://github.com/talex5/mirage-www/blob/master/tmpl/wiki/xen-on-cubieboard2.md

After following those instructions:

- The board boots with U-Boot from the microSD card.
- U-Boot runs Xen (arm32).
- Ubuntu 14.04 is used as dom0 with the Xen 4.4 toolstack.
- I can run an Ubuntu 13.10 guest, with its rootfs on an LVM volume
and working networking.

This all seems to be stable and working well. I'm using a guest VM as
a build system.

I'm currently looking into getting Mini-OS running as a Xen guest. My
repository (forked from https://github.com/KarimAllah/xen) is here:

  https://github.com/talex5/xen

Currently though it just contains a couple of hacks to make Mini-OS build.

> I put Gabor's instructions for his prototype up at:
> https://github.com/mirage/mirage/issues/186
>
> Installing a FreeBSD VM in the background now to recreate it...it managed
> to serve the full mirage-www website when he left it.
>
> -anil
>
>
>



-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard        http://0install.net/
GPG: 9242 9807 C985 3C07 44A6  8B9A AE07 8280 59A5 3CC1
GPG: DA98 25AE CAD0 8975 7CDA  BD8E 0713 3F96 CA74 D8BA

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