Vipul Gupta
Vipul is a software engineer at balena and a documentarian running his docs initiative called Mixster. He advocates strongly for open-source, cheesecakes and party parrots.
@vipulgupta2048
Chip shortage. What's that?
@vipulgupta2048
I am Vipul!
@vipulgupta2048
We-pull
- Product Owner & Documentation Lead at balena
- Run docs initiative called Mixster
- Contributions: Sugar Labs, PSF - ScrapingHub
- Organizes SustainOSS India, PyCon India & ALiAS
- Pronouns: He/him/his
@vipulgupta2048
This is a Raspberry Pi
It ain't much ...
Devices like these power...
CO2 sensors, farms, smart dustbins, cars, locks, your room, home devices...
@vipulgupta2048
and more like this...
Underwater drones, satellites, parking, and your talking wireless speakers
@vipulgupta2048
@vipulgupta2048
But, when someone parks their ship the wrong way around...
The world loses their mind ...
And events like these don't help...
Is it a bird? Is it a Pokemon? No, it's ...
The solution to this
@vipulgupta2048
Meet Quick EMUlator
- Generic & open-source machine emulator and virtualizer
- Allows you to run an OS within another OS (Same or different)
- First release on 4th March 2009 under GPL v2
It's also well supported
What really is QEMU? How does it work? How does it accomplish this dark magic?
- The kitchen is your computer, QEMU is the chef
- Customers are your operating systems/applications
- Customers are picky, need different dishes (hardware)
@vipulgupta2048
And, QEMU can be overwhelming
Like you know you have to go to the 5th floor
... But which staircase will get me to there. No clue.
How
Does
it Work?
I am here to help, let's start with
Glados, our host system.
➜ ~ screenfetch
vipulgupta2048@pop-os
OS: Pop 22.04 jammy
Kernel: x86_64 Linux 6.4.6-76060406-generic
##### Uptime: 4h 14m
####### Packages: Unknown
##O#O## Shell: fish 3.6.1
####### Resolution: 1920x1080
########### DE: GNOME 41.4
############# WM: Mutter
############### WM Theme: Sweet
################ GTK Theme: Pop-dark [GTK2/3]
################# Icon Theme: candy-icons-master
##################### Font: Fira Sans Semi-Light 10
##################### Disk: 228G / 307G (79%)
################# CPU: Intel Core i7-10510U @ 8x 800MHz
GPU: Intel Corporation CometLake-U GT2
RAM: 8328MiB / 15623MiB
Raspberry Pi 3, our actual device.
- Cortex-A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.4GHz
- 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM
- 2.4GHz and 5GHz IEEE 802.11.b/g/n/ac wireless LAN
- Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0
- Extended 40-pin GPIO header
- Full-size HDMI
- 4 USB 2.0 ports
- CSI camera port // DSI display port
- 4-pole stereo output and composite video port
Meet the virtual Raspberry Pi 3.
- 4x 64-bit cores
- 1GB RAM
- Internet access from host system
- Stdin access is available with serial or even SSH
- USB ports with pass through
- Video output feature to SDL or VGA
- Audio pass through
- Lot of Storage
QEMU emulates specifications, not machines.
Steps before the build
Check Virtualization status in the system
➜ egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
16
If the value is more than 0, then your system has an Intel VT-x (vmx) processor or AMD-V (svm) processor.
Steps before the build
Check if we have the KVM module in the system
➜ lsmod | grep kvm
kvm_intel 528384 0
kvm 1347584 1 kvm_intel
And, we got the KVM modules needed by QEMU when we need it. To be explained more later.
Steps before the build
Some important, other optional to install in your distro
qemu-system-aarch64
KVM
bridge-utils
libvirt
qemu-monitorDisclaimer
Use a GUI if you want to!
Full comparison list of alternatives because it's perfectly fine to use Virt-manager, parallels, VirtualBox, Hyper-V (for Windows)
Getting Started
This is the command to start your RPi Machine
qemu-system-aarch64 -enable-kvm \
-machine raspi3b -cpu cortex-a53 \
-dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb \
-m 1G -smp 4 \
-kernel kernel8.img \
-sd ./Downloads/rpi.img \
-append "rw earlyprintk loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0,115200 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=1" \
-device usb-net,netdev=net0 \
-netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
-no-reboot -nographic \
Breaking it down: KVM
Kernel module used with QEMU to provide direct hardware virtualization and boost performance
qemu-system-aarch64 -enable-kvm \
-machine raspi3b -cpu cortex-a53 \
-m 1G -smp 4 \
-dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb \
-kernel kernel8.img \
-sd ./Downloads/rpi.img \
-append "rw earlyprintk loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0,115200
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=1" \
-device usb-net,netdev=net0 \
-netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
-no-reboot -nographic \
Machine & CPU
Specifying machine model, memory allocation & cores
qemu-system-aarch64 -enable-kvm \
-machine raspi3b -cpu cortex-a53 \
-m 1G -smp 4 \
-dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb \
-kernel kernel8.img \
-sd ./Downloads/rpi.img \
-append "rw earlyprintk loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0,115200
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=1" \
-device usb-net,netdev=net0 \
-netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
-no-reboot -nographic \
Device Tree Blob, Kernel & Image
Specifying the hardware layout of RPi3, informing QEMU what hardware is available to virtualize.
qemu-system-aarch64 -enable-kvm \
-machine raspi3b -cpu cortex-a53 \
-m 1G -smp 4 \
-dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb \
-kernel kernel8.img \
-sd ./Downloads/rpi.img \
-append "rw earlyprintk loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0,115200
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=1" \
-device usb-net,netdev=net0 \
-netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
-no-reboot -nographic \
Network, Connected devices
Options to configure network connections with host computer, GUI, and SSH ports
qemu-system-aarch64 -enable-kvm \
-machine raspi3b -cpu cortex-a53 \
-m 1G -smp 4 \
-dtb bcm2710-rpi-3-b.dtb \
-kernel kernel8.img \
-sd ./Downloads/rpi.img \
-append "rw earlyprintk loglevel=8 console=ttyAMA0,115200
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=1" \
-device usb-net,netdev=net0 \
-netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
-no-reboot -nographic \
Barely scratching the surface
- USB Pass-through from the host
- SPICE - Copy and paste from host/guest
- Snapshots to restore systems
- Mounting host drives to guest
- Lots more to experiment
But Vipul, how can I use this now at work?
- Production Deployments
- Resource Segmentation
- IaaS & PaaS
- Disaster recovery
- Experimentation chamber
- Training & research
- Employee desktop virtualization
VM1
VM2
VM4
VM3
Autokit
(controller)
Feedback on changes
Developing and testing software
on target architecture
in a CI/CD pipeline
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QEMU
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Hardware Protoyping
Build software, before hardware gets ready
Testing firmware changes before releases
- Support Legacy systems
- Play games on emulators
- Safe data migration from old tech
- Penetration testing
- Malware testing
- Stress testing
Testing Operating Systems on virtual devices
Quick Summary
- QEMU is not a pokemon
- It requires breaking things to learn
- It can near natively emulate hardware
- It's quite extensive in both features, & usecases
- And, you too can be a master chef!
And, that's about it!
Questions? Collaborate? Work with us? Reach out!
Vipul Gupta
Reviews cheesecakes, solves GitHub issues & runs memeservice.
Feedback please + Link to the slides
[OSSEU 23] Building a Virtual Raspberry Pi using QEMU
By Vipul Gupta
[OSSEU 23] Building a Virtual Raspberry Pi using QEMU
In this session, we will focus on the basics of virtualization, and how it differs from emulation, containerization, what is QEMU, and alternatives like KVM & libvirt and more. The talk was presented to folks attending Open Source Summit 2023 in Bilbao, Spain
