[elbe-devel] KVM on 32-bit host

[Manuel Traut]

Hi Marc,

On 02:53 Sun 24 Apr     , Mark Ruys wrote:
> I'm seem to be spamming this mailinglist, sorry for that.

no problem, this is the reason why we have this list!
 
> I use ELBE 1.0 on a 64 bit Debian Jessie in VMware Fusion on a Mac (nested HV enabled). For some reasons I prefer to develop and build on a 32 bit Debian Jessie environment. But it doesn't work. When I try to make a initvm, I get:
> 
> ...
> make[1]: Entering directory '/home/markr/rootfs/initvm'
> rm -rf tmp-tree
> mkdir tmp-tree
> cp .elbe-in/*.cfg tmp-tree/
> cp .elbe-in/apt.conf tmp-tree/
> mkdir -p tmp-tree/etc/apt
> cp .elbe-in/apt.conf tmp-tree/etc/apt
> mkdir -p tmp-tree/usr/lib/post-base-installer.d
> cp .elbe-in/init-elbe.sh tmp-tree/
> cp .elbe-in/source.xml tmp-tree/
> mkdir -p .elbe-gen
> gzip -cd .elbe-in/initrd.gz >.elbe-gen/initrd-preseeded
> cd tmp-tree && find . | cpio -H newc -o --append -F ../.elbe-gen/initrd-preseeded
> 15 blocks
> gzip -9f .elbe-gen/initrd-preseeded
> rm -rf tmp-tree
> qemu-img create -f qcow2 buildenv.img 80G
> Formatting 'buildenv.img', fmt=qcow2 size=85899345920 encryption=off cluster_size=65536 lazy_refcounts=off 
> mkdir -p .stamps
> touch .stamps/stamp-create-buildenv-img
> kvm
> 
> add then nothing. CPU is idle, can wait for hours.
>
> By chance, there isn't anybody here how knows why? And how to fix it?
 
at the moment, only amd64 initvm's are supported. So you are emulating a 64 bit CPU on a 32 bit Host with
nested virtualization, obviously you triggered some bugs, but even if it works it is very very slow.

We are planning to support other architectures for the initvm. At least arm64 would be very cool to have for
building arm based images. Another thing is, that we want to drop the 'elbe-bootstrap' package that is a
wrapper package for the debian-installer. I'd like to change both things in one step. But i can't promise
a date we come up with a working solution.

  Manuel