Environment

This chapter contains various notes on configuration and setup of the host system (Linux), and the hypervisor (QEMU) to use either pass-through or emulate various technologies for the nrkernel and develop for it.

Install QEMU from sources

Make sure the QEMU version for the account is is >= 6 . The following steps can be used to build it from scratch, if it the Ubuntu release has a lesser version in the package repository.

First, make sure to uncomment all #deb-src lines in /etc/apt/sources.list if not already uncommented. Then, run the following commands:

For any build:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential libpmem-dev libdaxctl-dev ninja-build flex bison
apt source qemu
sudo apt build-dep qemu

For non-rackscale:

wget https://download.qemu.org/qemu-6.0.0.tar.xz
tar xvJf qemu-6.0.0.tar.xz
cd qemu-6.0.0

For non-rackscale OR rackscale:

git clone https://github.com/hunhoffe/qemu.git qemu
cd qemu
git checkout --track origin/dev/ivshmem-numa

For any build:

./configure --enable-rdma --enable-libpmem
make -j 28
sudo make -j28 install
sudo make rdmacm-mux

# Check version (should be >=6.0.0)
qemu-system-x86_64 --version

You can also add --enable-debug to the configure script which will add debug information (useful for source information when stepping through qemu code in gdb).

Note that sometimes make install doesn't actually replace the ivshmem-server. Use which ivshmem-server to find the current location and then overwrite it with qemu/build/contrib/ivshmem-server/ivshmem-server.