Re: How do I run hvt targets on qemu/kvm?

[Martin Lucina <martin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Hans,

others have already replied with instructions. Just to clarify the
higher-level concepts:

On Saturday, 24.10.2020 at 08:33, Hans Ole Rafaelsen wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
> When reading the MirageOS tutorials/documentation it seems like virtio
> target has some limitations. E.g. only one network interface supported.
> From the tutorials I get the impression that virtio will have limited
> support in the future, while hvt seems to be better supported.
> 
> Making virtio targets run on qemu/kvm is documented and quite
> straightforward . But I can not find any way to make hvt targets run on
> qemu/kvm.

QEMU/KVM, often referred to as just KVM has two parts to it. 

1) The kernel-mode Type II hypervisor, KVM.
2) The user-mode process that manages the VM, provides/emulates devices and
most of the "machine" part of the VM. This is known as the VMM (virtual
machine manager) and is generally provided by QEMU, crosvm, or some cloud
providers have an entirely custom, proprietary, codebase for it.

The virtio target is designed to run on most "classic" hypervisors that
provide 1) and 2), with 2) providing I/O devices based on the virtio
specification [1].

The hvt target, on the other hand, is an extremely minimalst replacement
for 2) above, provided by the Solo5 "tender" binary, solo5-hvt. In order to
run that, you need access to either

a) a bare metal server
b) a cloud provider which implements nested virtualization in 1), thus
effectively allowing you to run a nested instance of KVM and solo5-hvt on
it.

For more details, please see the Solo5 documentation [2].

> Is there some way to make hvt targets run on qemu/kvm?

TL;DR no. :-)

Cheers,

Martin

[1]
https://docs.oasis-open.org/virtio/virtio/v1.1/csprd01/virtio-v1.1-csprd01.html

[2] https://github.com/solo5/solo5/#about-solo5