Re: [Xen-devel] Android on XEN ARM question

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 29 May 2018, Peng Fan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am bringing up android on XEN on ARM, but android needs some features in 
> bootloader, such as A/B slot, dm verify and etc. With directly booting 
> android kernel, I could successfully boot up android directly passthrough 
> emmc controller to android OS. I am thinking to develop U-Boot on XEN to use 
> the bootloader feature, but this surely could not handle case that use a 
> file/partition for android.
> 
> Do you have any advices?

We already support running Tianocore (UEFI) as guest firmware today. I
think that having U-Boot running on Xen on ARM as guest firmware would
be fantastic!

Let's say that the DomU disk is backed by a file, for example you could
have:

  disk=['/dev/loop0,raw,xvda,w,backendtype=phy']

in your VM config file. U-Boot needs to be able to access the guest disk
image to be able to retrieve the Xen and kernel binaries. For that to
work, U-Boot needs to have a PV disk frontend driver. U-Boot also needs
shutdown cleanly the PV frontend connection before booting Xen. This is
certainly possible, and Anthony Perard (CC'ed) did similar work for
Tianocore a little while back:

https://marc.info/?l=xen-devel&m=141408836816060&w=2

With a proper PV disk frontend driver in U-Boot, the bootloader should
be able to perform all operations as if it was connected to a regular
emmc controller.

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