hubertf's NetBSD Blog
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[20080915] Debugging NetBSD kernel with qemu
Alexander Shishkin has written some posted instructions on how to debug a NetBSD kernel running in qemu with gdb. He reminds how to build NetBSD, provides a shell script for making a bootable disk, and explains the magic on how to run qemu and connect gdb to it. An example session shows how to load the kernel, set a breakpoint, and examine registers and variables when the breakpoint is reached.

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[20071029] Note to self: Getting X with 1024x768 in qemu (Updated)
I keep on forgetting, and will abuse my blog now to remember how to get a standard installation of NetBSD 4.0(RC3 here) with standard X to run 1024x768 in Qemu:

  • In the "Monitor" section, add:
         HorizSync 28-51
         VertRefresh 43-60 
  • Keep the "cirrus" driver

  • In the "Depth 16" subsection of the "Screen" section, add:
         Modes "1024x768" 
Update: This also goes for Parallels. A "DefaultDepth 24" may be needed in the "Screen" section.

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[20070801] Emulating OpenMoko on NetBSD using Qemu
OpenMoko is a mobile phone that was designed to run open source software (i.e. Linux :). There are some ideas to port NetBSD to that platform, but until there's hardware available, Noud de Brouwer pointed me at instructions on emulating the OpenMoko hardware in Qemu, using software available in pkgsrc-wip. Includes links to a number of screenshots, showing Qemu-Neo1973 running OpenMoko/Linux on NetBSD.

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[20070425] qemu vs. X *Updated(
Trying to run qemu on a remote machine today gave me:
local% ssh -X remote
remote%  qemu $options 
X Error of failed request:  BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  25 (X_SendEvent)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x40
  Serial number of failed request:  12
  Current serial number in output stream:  17 
After a round of cursing and googling, the solution seems to be to use "ssh -Y":
remote% exit
local% ssh -Y remote
remote%  qemu $options 
... and things work as expected. Doh! (FWIW, what does "ssh -Y do? According to the manpage here, it "Enables trusted X11 forwarding" - how obvious from the error message! :-/)

Now if qemu from a remote machine was actually usable that would be nice - turns out the scroll speed is unacceptably slow, though. :(

Update: I was using qemu 0.8.0 on these machines, and after upgrading to 0.9.0, this version also offers running Qemu with a VNC server that one can then connect to. I still have to try that one from at home (working around a few firewalls :-/), but with some tricky SSH port forwardings that may be possible - and can't possibly be slower than just Qemu via remote X. Thanks to sec for the hint!

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[20061120] Automated testing: Fun with pexpect, qemu, and sysinst
This was posted quite some time ago, and I never got around to mention it here. Now that the topic came up in a related context, I think Andreas Gustafsson's work should be mentioned: in his posting to tech-install, he describes how to use qemu as sandbox to automate a NetBSD install that is scripted with pexpect, for the sake of regression testing the installer and quality assurance.

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[20061020] Xen with HVM and hardware virtualization: Booting Windows XP in a DomU
Manuel Bouyer has continued his work on the NetBSD/Xen port, and his latest results include support to use the Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) interface for Intel and AMD CPUs that support virtualization as well as the Qemu Device Model (Qemu-dm), which is a modified Qemu running in Dom0 that is used to emulate some hardware devices, see Manuel's first posting to the port-xen list and the thread starting from it.

In related news, Manuel has updated the packages for the latest Xen release (3.0.3) and a new one to support HVM (which needs X, in order to emulate a VGA console via Qemu, see above). With that package, it was possible to boot systems that were not specifically prepared for use with Xen, e.g. NetBSD/i386, Linux and Windows XP! See Manuel's second posting and the followups.

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[20060504] Using qemu in SysAdmin class
I'm teaching System Administration again this summer, and after some basic system analysis and scripting, the course is reachinga point where practical exercises require root permissions to be useful. While e.g. my Virtual Unix Lab is nice for students to train certain exercises and get feedback on their training, the system is limited to one student at a time (right now), and as it does not provide console access and recovery may be problematic if the system is thrashed, I let my students play with qemu today.

I did setup a 200MB harddisk image with NetBSD (could be anything). Instead of copying this huge file onto students' tiny (50MB quota) accounts, I used the "copy on write" feature of Qemu instead. Basically, the following script was given to students to run:

     $ cat ~hubertf/tmp/qemu/qemu.sh
     #!/bin/sh
     QEMU_HOME=/home/feyrer/tmp/qemu
     roimg=${QEMU_HOME}/harddisk.netbsd
     rwimg=harddisk.qemu
     
     if [ ! -f $rwimg ]; then
             qemu-img create -b $roimg -f qcow $rwimg
     fi
     
     qemu \
             -hda $rwimg \
             -cdrom ${QEMU_HOME}/i386pkg-3.0.iso \
             -boot c 
This first creates a copy-on-write image ($rwimg) from my master image ($roimg), which just takes up a few kb, depending on what students do. After that, qemu is started normally, and students can modify "their" (qemu) system as they like. For later sessions, the students' local image ($rwimg) is kept so they can continue working on the image, and if something goes terribly wrong, the student image can be deleted and upon next start of the script the student will start with a fresh version from the master image.

There are several interesting aspects of using Qemu this way: 1) it saves disk space for students, by using copy-on-write images. 2) Qemu doesn't need any kernel modules or special privileges to run. Whatever students do, they can not possibly violate host system security. 3) thanks to Qemu's built in network stack (and application level gateway, DHCP server, router, DNS server etc.), a lot of networking can be done from within Qemu. 4) Easy recovery as described above.

In short: Qemu rocks once more!

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[20060427] dmesgs: NetBSD/Xen in qemu
Being a qemu-whore^W^W^Wlazy, I wanted to play with Xen, but never found the hardware to do so. Once again, qemu came to the rescue, and following the fine NetBSD/Xen howto, I managed to setup Xen in qemu.

Setup and configuration was dead easy, and NetBSD comes with some excellent infrastructure to setup a machine that starts up multiple domUs automatically, by simply adding the needed config files into /usr/pkg/etc/xen.

The qemu disk image is 1GB in size so I'll not make this available (but can upload it on request, if someone wants?), but for kicks here are dmesg outputs of the host running qemu, the Xen dom0 running inside qemu and a Xen domU domain.

Harddisk usage of the 1GB disk is, in dom0: two 180MB disk images for the domU filesystems, mounted via vnd(4). About 100MB of additional packages are installed to manage Xen plus some other things pulled in to support that (Python, Perl and lots of modules), 100MB for X, some 200MB for a full installation of NetBSD 3.0/i386 (used on the Xen kernel) which includes development and text processing environment, documentation and manpages. The rest of the disk is dedicated to swap.

The system is setup to use grub as bootloader, which offers booting either a 'regular' NetBSD/i386 kernel (i.e. no Xen), or the Xen hypervison, which then boots a NetBSD/Xen kernel, that uses the NetBSD/i386 userland to boot.

After the system has booted to multiuser mode, started the two domUs, and after logging in as root, the domU consoles can be accessed by telnetting to localhost port 9601 and 9602, respectively. Networking for the domUs is setup in the domU config files: all domUs, the dom0 plus the physical ethernet interface are all plugged into a (virtual) switch (implemented via bridge(4)), which is then bridged to the "normal" ethernet - Voila, network for all domains!

FWIW, here's what a Xen domU config file looks:

$ cat /usr/pkg/etc/xen/hf1
kernel="/netbsd-XENU"
memory=32
name="hf1"
nics=1

vif = [ 'mac=52:54:00:12:34:57, bridge=bridge0' ]

disk = [ 'file:/harddisk.xen-hf1,wd0d,w' ]
root="/dev/wd0d" 

Installation of a Xen domU with NetBSD works by creating a harddisk image, and then using the INSTALL_XENU kernel, which boots right into an installer that can then be used to install NetBSD on the disk(image). Installation sets can be fetched using the local network e.g. via FTP from dom0. Of course after setting up one domU harddisk image, setting up the other one is a mere "cp img1 img2", with some small changes for hostname and SSH keys etc.

In summary, I'm very impressed by the "roundness" of the Xen integration into NetBSD - no hacking, just add config files, disk images, and off you go.

Mmm, NetBSD!

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[20051222] Toying with qemu 0.8
I made a package for qemu 0.8 today (sent it off to the maintainer), to see what's new. And boy, SMP supports looks quite funny. I've played with two, four, sixteen and 128 CPUs, but qemu gets very slow then (apparently N times slower than 1 CPU for N CPUs). I managed to get to multiuser with 128 CPUs (of which NetBSD only recognized/used the first 20...), but due to some other process things (I'm not root on my work machine!) became unbearable slow and I deferred the playing to some other day.

Anyone got success with sparc SMP, or booting NetBSD/sparc in general, or NetBSD/macppc or any of the AFM or MIPS platforms? Please let me know if so! :)

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[20051221] Tripping over not-so-standard standard types
Well, or maybe just non-standard use of them. Trying to build qemu 0.8 today (with SMP for i386 and sparc!), I tripped over some evil code that builds symbols from types using some extended cpp(1) magic:
 #define IN_T int8_t
 
 ...
 
 #define ET glue (ENDIAN_CONVERSION, glue (_, IN_T))
 
 ...
 
 static void glue (glue (conv_, ET), _to_mono)
     (st_sample_t *dst, const void *src, int samples, volume_t *vol)
 { ... }
 
 t_sample *mixeng_conv[2][2][2][2] = {
     { 
         {
             {
 		conv_natural_uint8_t_to_mono,
 		conv_natural_uint16_t_to_mono
 	    }
 	    ...  
(Some data ommitted, see audio/mixeng.c and audio/mixeng_template.h).
This led to fireworks, as conv_natural___uint8_t_to_mono was not defined - note the two extra underscores!

As it turns out, the NetBSD 2.x system I did this on actually has uint8_t (and others) as a #define to the corresponding types with __, which then leads to the above effect. Of course the right way is not to use #define but typedef here, but upgrading to NetBSD 3.0 (which does the right thing) is not an option right now).

So I tried to come up with some equally evil cpp(1) magic to expand the symbol in the second place, replacing:

 	conv_natural_uint8_t_to_mono,
 	conv_natural_uint16_t_to_mono 
with
 	NBglue(conv_natural_, uint8_t, _to_mono),
 	NBglue(conv_natural_, uint16_t, _to_mono) 
the idea here was to add a
 	#define NBglue(x,y,z) x ## y ## z 
that does the right thing, but it didn't - the "y" symbol was not expanded by cpp(1)! I tried a second version:
 	#define NBexpand(x) x
 	#define NBglue(x,y,z) x ## NBexpand(y) ## z 
but here again the symbol was not expanded but used literally, and I got complaints that "conv_natural_NBexpand(uint16_t)_to_mono" was not a valid symbol - surprise. So the final answer was -- thanks to Christos at this point! -- this one:
 	#define _NBglue(x,y,z) x ## y ## z
 	#define NBglue(x,y,z) _NBglue(x,y,z) 
This expands the types properly.

What lesson can be learned from this? 1) don't use #define where typedef is the right thing 2) don't blindly assume someone followed rule 1).

Oh, and someone please feel free to go back and clean up this whole code, apparently it was de-C++-ified at some time, according to some comment... :)

And finally, if someone's got some success with the kqemu or that other kernel-module whose name I forgot, please let me know! :)

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