Xen project Mailing List

Greetings, all. Last year I asked about an ARM development board, and Stefano kindly pointed me at the Arndale. I ordered one once they were available, and finally took some time to attempt to get it working. I crawled through _many_ threaded websites including the arndale wiki, linaro releases, and the various xenprojects for arndale. I'm at the point where I think I have most of a "cookbook recipe." So, instead of following a nested, multi-path journey through web pages, I captured one straight-through process with the intent that someone completely new to building Xen, Linux, and the Arndale could follow it in a long afternoon (believe me, it took me a LOT longer than that to get to this point). Of course it references all the real web pages for the sources of the instructions.

At the moment it seems like getting Xen itself compiled and running was the most straightforward part of the whole exercise, due to the clear documentation and rock solid makefiles. It's all the stuff around Xen that has been the battle...

One thing that is different is that on my first several attempts, I installed the cross-compiler environment, and built Xen that way. However, it was faster (less work, many fewer chances for me to mess something up) in my experiments to build Xen natively on the Arndale, under linaro 14.03. Even on the uSD, it was whippy fast. With that approach, Xen boots, seems happy, and launches dom0:

ARNDALE5250 # bootm $xen_addr - $dtb_addr
## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 50000000 ...
     Image Name:
     Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
     Data Size:    688924 Bytes = 672.8 KiB
     Load Address: 80200000
     Entry Point: 80200000
     Verifying Checksum ... OK
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 42000000
     Booting using the fdt blob at 0x42000000
     Loading Kernel Image ... OK
OK
     reserving fdt memory region: addr=42000000 size=9000
     Using Device Tree in place at 42000000, end 4200bfff

Startinllllllllllllllll- UART enabled -
- CPU 00000000 booting -
- Xen starting in Hyp mode -
- Zero BSS -
- Setting up control registers -
- Turning on paging -
- Ready -
(XEN) Checking for initrd in /chosen
(XEN) RAM: 0000000040000000 - 000000004fffffff
(XEN) RAM: 0000000050000000 - 000000005fffffff

...

**********************************************
(XEN) 3... 2... 1...
(XEN) *** Serial input -> DOM0 (type 'CTRL-a' three times to switch input to Xen)
(XEN) Freed 264kB init memory.
[    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0
[    0.000000] Linux version 3.14.0 (linaro@linaro-server) (gcc version 4.8.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.8.1-10ubuntu8) ) #1 SMP M4
[    0.000000] Kernel was built at commit id 'af538aa'
[    0.000000] CPU: ARMv7 Processor [410fc0f4] revision 4 (ARMv7), cr=70c7387d
[    0.000000] CPU: PIPT / VIPT nonaliasing data cache, PIPT instruction cache
[    0.000000] Machine model: Insignal Arndale evaluation board based on EXYNOS5250

I'm still working with getting dom0 running (just found a fat fingered mistake in my last manual u-boot run-through). However, I thought I'd offer the instructions to date, since I noticed a couple people ask for a way to launch Xen from the SD card.

What's the etiquette for doing so? At the moment it is a 5-page Google Doc. Anyone interested if I clipped it and posted it directly to the list as text, or is there a better way to share it?

-TC

[Xen-devel] Xen on new Arndale 5250