Tag: Qemu

Posted on

Getting coredumps of Qemu on Fedora

Recently it happened that a virtual machine crashed reproducible. journalctl contained messages from audit indicating the crash:

audit[88047]: ANOM_ABEND auid=4294967295 uid=107 gid=107 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:svirt_t:s0:c422,c704 pid=88047 comm="qemu-system-x86" exe="/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64" sig=6 res=1

I was hoping to get a coredump from it, however, coredumpctl had no corefile (COREFILE column read “none”). There was another message in journalctl which also showed the reason:

systemd-coredump[90346]: Resource limits disable core dumping for process 88047 (qemu-system-x86).

However, ulimit -a (even as user qemu) showed that core file size is unlimited. It seems that something (probably virsh) adjusts limits for that particular process (Max core file size is set to 0 and 0 bytes). Continue reading “Getting coredumps of Qemu on Fedora”

Posted on

ARM Linux Kernel early startup code debugging

This post shows how to debug early (pre-decompression/pre-relocation) initialization code of an ARM (Aarch32) Linux kernel. Debugging kernel code is often not needed and anyway rather hard due to the interaction with real hardware and concurrency in play.  However, to watch, read and learn about early ARM initialization code, debugging can be really useful. Early Initialization is running without concurrency anyway, so this is not a problem in this case.

Before starting, I assume you have a working ARM cross compile environment, a compiled kernel and Qemu at hand. Make sure to compile the kernel with debug symbols (CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL=y and CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=y). I use the following arguments to start Qemu:

$ /usr/bin/qemu-system-arm -s -S -M virt -smp 1 \
  -nographic -monitor none -serial stdio \
  -kernel arch/arm/boot/zImage \
  -initrd core-image-minimal-qemuarm.cpio_.gz \
  -append "console=ttyAMA0 earlycon earlyprintk"

Especially the arguments -s -S are notable here, since the former makes sure Qemu’s built-in debugger is available at port 1234 and the latter stops the machine. This now allows to connect to Qemu using gdb. I use the gdb from my ARM cross compiler toolchain. Once I have a gdb prompt, lets immediately enable gdb’s automatic disassembler on next line before connecting:

$ arm-buildroot-linux-gnueabihf-gdb
...
(gdb) set disassemble-next-line on
(gdb) show disassemble-next-line
Debugger's willingness to use disassemble-next-line is on.
(gdb) target remote :1234
Remote debugging using :1234
0x40000000 in ?? ()
=> 0x40000000: 00 00 a0 e3 mov r0, #0

Continue reading “ARM Linux Kernel early startup code debugging”

Posted on

Using KVM with Qemu on ARM

This is part two of my blog post about Kernel-Virtual Machine (KVM) on a 32-Bit ARM architecture. The post is meant as a starting point for those who want to play with KVM and provide a useful collection of Qemu commands for virtualization.

Virtualization host setup

The Kernel configuration I used for my platforms Host kernel can be found here. Since I run my experiments on a Toradex Colibri iMX7D module, I started with the v4.1 configuration of the BSP kernel and updated that to v4.8 plus enabled KVM as well as KSM (Kernel same-page merging).

As root file system I use a slightly modified version of the Ångström distributions “development-image”, version 2015.12 (built from scratch with OpenEmbedded). Any recent ARM root file system should do it. I let Qemu v2.6.0 preinstall (by just adding “qemu” to the image and specifying ANGSTROM_QEMU_VERSION = “2.6.0” in conf/distro/angstrom-v2015.12.conf).

Virtualization guest setup

For the virtualization guest setup I was looking for something minimalistic. I uploaded the compiled binary of the Kernel (as tared zImage) and initramfs (as cpio.gz).

I built a custom kernel directly using v4.7 sources and a modified/stripped down version of the vexpress_defconfig (virt_guest_defconfig). I found it useful to look into Qemu’s “virt” machine setup code (hw/arm/virt.c) to understand what peripherals are actually emulated (and hence what drivers are actually required). Continue reading “Using KVM with Qemu on ARM”