illumos for AArch64 bootstrap

This tree is the bootstrap for illumos on AArch64. It contains sufficient pieces, and build materials, to build a bootable disk that can be used for development of the AArch64 port.

Dependencies

• An illumos system
• A compilation environment, headers, compiler, etc. (You will need both GCC 7, GCC 10, and their dependencies and build dependencies to include at least GMP, MPC, and MPFR):

  # Run this in OmniOS:
  sudo pkg install \
    pkg:/developer/gcc7 \
    pkg:/developer/gcc10 \
    pkg:/developer/pkg-config \
    pkg:/ooce/library/gnutls \
    pkg:/ooce/text/texinfo
  
  # Run this in OpenIndiana:
  sudo pkg install \
    pkg:/developer/gcc-7 \
    pkg:/developer/gcc-10 \
    pkg:/developer/build/pkg-config \
    pkg:/library/gnutls-3 \
    pkg:/text/texinfo
  
  # For OpenIndiana, this may be necessary before installing OpenSSL:
  sudo pkg set-mediator -V 1.1 openssl
  
  # Run this in OmniOS or OpenIndiana:
  sudo pkg install \
    pkg:/developer/astdev \
    pkg:/developer/illumos-closed \
    pkg:/developer/swig \
    pkg:/developer/build/gnu-make \
    pkg:/developer/build/onbld \
    pkg:/developer/java/openjdk8 \
    pkg:/developer/parser/bison \
    pkg:/file/gnu-coreutils \
    pkg:/library/mpc \
    pkg:/library/perl-5/xml-parser \
    pkg:/library/security/openssl-11 \
    pkg:/media/cdrtools \
    pkg:/network/rsync \
    pkg:/security/sudo \
    pkg:/shell/pipe-viewer \
    pkg:/system/zones/internal

Building

To build there are three-ish steps

1. make download -- Fetch all the other sources we need at their correct versions. (By default this takes shallow-ish clones of big trees, feel free to replace them with full clones).
2. make setup -- Build all the prerequisites to building illumos
3. make illumos -- Build illumos The environment file is in env/aarch64 in this directory, and is what gets used for bootstrapping.
4. make disk -- Build the disk image which you can give to qemu(1) This will also ask for your password, so if you just run make disk and let dependencies take over, that won't go great.

Note that make sysroot and make download-omnios may be run multiple times as you work to keep those pieces up-to-date, the latter is especially useful as that goes into the disk image we create.

Booting

Take the illumos-disk.img you have built, and the inetboot.bin for your platform (likely qemu) out of the proto area, and supply them to qemu

I use something like this:

sudo qemu-system-aarch64 -nographic -machine virt -m 2g -smp 2 -cpu cortex-a53 -kernel inetboot.bin -append "-D /virtio_mmio@a003c00" -netdev vnic,ifname=braich0,id=net0 -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=52:54:00:70:0a:e4 -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 -drive file=$PWD/illumos-disk.img,format=raw,id=hd0,if=none

• -nographic -- serial console on stdout
• -machine virt -- the current target qemu machine
• -m 2g -- 2G of memory, more can never hurt
• -smp 2 -- 2 CPUs, again, more shouldn't hurt
• -cpu cortex-a53 -- an appropriate CPU for the port
• -kernel inetboot.bin -- the inetboot.bin for qemu taken from the illumos build
• -append "-D /virtio_mmio@a003c00" -- tell inetboot where to boot from
• -netdev vnic,ifname=braich0,id=net0 -- vnic networking
• -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0,mac=52:54:00:70:0a:e4 -- virtual NIC, vioif0 in the system. The MAC must match your vnic.
• -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 -- our disk
• -drive file=illumos-disk.img,format=raw,id=hd0,if=none -- the illumos disk image you want to boot.

A convenient way to do this is just to take the entire qemu-setup/ directory. Note that the default configuration we use is trying to strike a balance between running on smaller systems and booting in an even vaguely tolerable amount of time. It is a balance we have not yet reached.

Note: the networking configuration here is important, you need to have a networking device for the device tree to be what we expect right now. The configuration above and in run.sh is for qemu on illumos using vnic networking, using a vnic braich0. If this is inappropriate for you, you need to provide an alternative, in the worst case user networking -netdev user,id=net0.

You will see messages from the temporary booter that seem worrying, about missing boot_archives and vdev_probe, these are, weirdly, specific to the currently weird booting method.

Once you have booted you will see copious boot messages both to aid debugging and because the emulation is slow and it helps to keep track that something is still happening, these are hardwired in the source at present, absent a real booter.

There are also lingering bugs around SMF that may or may not fail during boot. The two most notable are that, after messages indicating your CPU(s) are online, things will pause without output while svvcfg apply happens. The other is that svc:/system/rbac, svc:/network/inetd-upgrade, and svc:/system/update-man-index almost always time out, and often take a long time to do so, be patient. The first of these has dependencies, and so stall a lot of our boot process.

After you boot

root has no password (at all, rather than an empty password).

Find something to fix! Lots of things are missing are broken! Many of them important!

The most notable things for fixing stuff are that we have at present no mdb(1) or kmdb(1) or dtrace(8), which is unfortunate.

We build a cross gdb(1) to tide us over, which can be used to analyze core dumps from the virtual machine (you can just mount your pool back onto a development machine, etc), or to analyze the running kernel code directly (connect to the gdb server).

(gdb) target remote tcp::1234

There is a .gdbinit in this directory which does useful things like load the inetboot and unix for qemu and provide a load-kernel-modules command to load the other modules currently present in the running kernel. It is not great, but it is something.

See Also

• IPD 24 Support for 64-bit ARM (AArch64)