Hacking SLOF Clients

SLOF includes a few clients. Especially the net-snk client is interesting as it allows one to add applications which can be started by specifying their name on the command line when booting the kernel.

In order to hack SLOF client applications, the sec-client target must be built in the clients/net-snk subdirectory of the SLOF source tree. Before this can succeed, the CPUARCH environment variable must be set, like this:

$ export CPUARCH=ppc970

Latest Version of KOMAscript

The Tex Live distribution Mac OS X is getting more outdated by the day. Maybe there's a way to update it, but I didn't bother to check.

For a reasonably good layout of letters without a footer I found that a recent version of KOMAscript is required. I'm using Version 2.98 obtained from http://dante.ctan.org/.

Installing the new version proved to be quite easy:

$ cd /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist
$ sudo unzip komascript.tds.zip
$ sudo texconfig rehash

Cross compiling the FreeBSD Kernel

Wow, two post in one day already ;-)

There are two things I'd like to note. First, I noticed that cross-compiling seems a major issue for me. Don't know why that is.

Second, I need to remember Warner Losh's post on cross compiling FreeBSD. Essentialy, the procedure is:

$ export TARGET=powerpc
$ export TARGET_ARCH=powerpc
$ make kernel-toolchain
$ make buildkernel

Addendum: Unfortunately, this procedure works only on architectures already supported by FreeBSD and its build system. Therefore, it doesn't work for me. So here's the full story on how I got FreeBSD to at least compile.

Building the Toolchain

Building the toolchain is pretty straight forward. I've already written about how to build a cross compiler. On FreeBSD however, four things are different.

• The target is powerpc64-unknown-freebsd. I don't know if powerpc64-unknown-elf would have worked, too.
• The target is new, so a patch to the binutils sources is required.
• The GNU MP Bignum Library (GMP) is required. I used version GMP 4.2.1 and installed it in $PREFIX
• Finally, the MPFT Library needs to be built. I used version MPFT 2.3.0 and installed it in $PREFIX

Note that those steps have to be performed before the compiler is built. Since I didn't install the libraries in the standard locations, the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable needs to be set before the compiler can be used:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PREFIX/lib

Building the Kernel

The basic procedure of building a kernel is outlined in the FreeBSD Developer's Handbook. Provided that the cross compiler has been installed in $PREFIX, these steps are required:

$ export MACHINE=powerpc64
$ export MACHINE_ARCH=powerpc64
$ export CC=${PREFIX}/${TARGET_PREFIX}-gcc
$ export NM=${PREFIX}/${TARGET_PREFIX}-nm
$ export LD=${PREFIX}/${TARGET_PREFIX}-ld
$ export SYSTEM_LD=${LD}
$ export OBJCOPY=${PREFIX}/${TARGET_PREFIX}-objcopy
$ cd /usr/src/sys/powerpc64/conf
$ config KERNCONF
$ cd ../compile/KERNCONF
$ make cleandepend && make depend
$ make kernel

Oh, of course this doesn't work with the stock FreeBSD sources. Instead, my FreeBSD 64-Bit PowerPC Mercurial repository needs to be used. Note that for convenience reasons, that tree includes a crossenv script which, when sourced, sets up the required environment variables.

Linux KVM (kvm-70) on IBM Open Client 2.2

The Linux kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) is a great way for virtualization on computers running Linux. It requires virtualization support by the host processor (most modern x86 CPUs have this) and a kernel module. The kernel module can be built from the KVM sources.

Unfortunately, compiling the module on the IBM Open Client 2.2 distribution doesn't work out of the box. Instead, a patch is required. The patch is an extended version of this commit to the KVM repository and applies against the KVM-70 release tar ball.

Networking

The KVM networking documentation lists brctl(8) and tunctl(8) as requirements for a bridge between the host and the guest. On the Open Client distribution, the brctl utility is part of the bridge-utils package whereas the tunctl tool is part of uml-utils - on other distributions, that is. However, there is a Fedora Core 9 package available which seems to work.

Before starting the KVM guest, make sure that the tun kernel module is loaded. These are the steps I use to start the guest:

$ sudo modprobe tun
$ MACADDR=`genmac`
$ sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -hda freebsd-7.0.img \
   -net nic,macaddr=$MACADDR -net tap,script=qemu-ifup

Note that the genmac and qemu-ifup scripts are the examples from the KVM documentation.

NAT on the bridge

Because I cannot put the KVM guest on the host network, I need to do NAT on the host. I've found this quick tutorial on NAT with iptables. The four steps are:

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
# iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o tap0 -m state \
     --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
# iptables -A FORWARD -i tap0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT

Also, make sure the tap0 interface has an IP address:

$ sudo ifconfig tap0 192.168.0.1/24

PowerPC Device Tree Compiler

The Device Tree Compiler (DTC) project is hosted at OzLabs. The website seems to be unavailable at the moment, but the git repository at git://ozlabs.org/srv/projects/dtc/dtc.git seems to work.

Cross-building the tools works fine. This is what I did:

$ export CC=ppu-gcc
$ make

This will create the dtc and ftdump tools which can then be copied to the target machine.