Enabling Palacios PXE-Boot

Chen Jin
Bharath Pattabiraman
Patrick Foley
What is PXE?
Preboot eXecution Environment - a standard for booting
an OS from the network. Most machines BIOSes
support PXE. But, the BIOS used by Palacios does not.
Capability to boot independent of data storage devices
(like hard disks) or installed OS'es.
Defined on the foundation of widely used internet
protocols such as DHCP, and TFTP.
Our Goal
Add PXE network boot support to a Palacios guest so
that we can network-boot VMs.
o Change the BIOS (or)
o Find any other alternative solution
How does it work?

Step 1: Client makes DHCP request (broadcast) for IP

address

Step 2: DHCP Server responds with IP address and also the

next-server, which is the IP address of the boot server
that contains the bootloader. It also sends the file name
that should be used for booting.

Step 3: Client contacts the boot server (using the TFTP -

Trivial FTP protocol)
How does it work? (contd...)

Step 4: Boot server replies with bootloader.

Step 5: Client loads bootloader into memory.

Step 6: Boot loader retrieves other files needed for

booting from boot server and starts the booting process.

The files required to be present in the TFTP server are:

pxelinux.0 - boot loader for linux-like OS for PXE
bzImage - the compressed kernel image
init_task - the initial root filesystem
How does it work?
Client and Server setup
Server side
o DHCP and TFTP server running on server side
o Knoppix (debian-based OS) which has these servers
preinstalled was used on one Qemu
o Configured the servers and created a hard drive image

Client side
o Kitten/Palacios running on another Qemu
Server side Setup
DHCP Server configuration:

subnet 172.21.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 {

range 172.21.0.3 172.21.0.100;
option broadcast-address 172.21.0.255;
}

group {
next-server 172.21.0.2;

host test {
fixed-address 172.21.0.50;
hardware ethernet 52:54:00:12:34:57;
filename "pxelinux.0";
}
}
Server side Setup
TFTP Server setup:
When a client boots up it will check if there is a file
corresponding to its own MAC address in the
/var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/ directory.
However after trying several options it will fall back to
requesting a default file.
So, we simply changed to default file to contain the
configuration we want.
DEFAULT kitten
LABEL kitten
kernel bzImage
append serial.baud=115200 console=serial initrd=init_task
The pxelinux.0, bzImage and init_task files were
placed in the tftpboot directory
 Implementation
Create a test bench for PXE booting, which
need consider both server and client
o Hard drive image
o Tap device
o VLAN
Boot guest os in kitten
o Boot PXE on client direcly to make sure rom omatic approcach
working
o NIC problems
 Server
Hard drive image
o in order to avoid reconfiguring the system
every time we use the Qemu, we decided to
create hard drive image which saves all the
configuration status.
 Server (cont'd)
Default
o "-net nic -net user
Tap device
o Host
Create the /dev/net/tun device node
mkdir /dev/net
mknod /dev/net/tun c 10 200

Setup the tap0 interface,

sudo tunctl //Create the tap0 interface using tunctl
sudo ifconfig tap0 192.168.100.1 up

o guest
-net tap,ifname=tap0
enter 192.168.100.2 as the ip address
 Tap Device
-net tap,ifname=tap0
 Server-client connection
VLAN
-net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=52:54:00:12:34:56,model=e1000

tap
Guest NIC VLAN 0
OS socket
 VLANs
-net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=52:54:00:12:34:56,model=e1000
-net socket,vlan=0,listen=localhost:9000

-net nic,vlan=2,macaddr=52:54:00:12:34:57,model=ne2k_pci
-net socket,vlan=2,connect=localhost:9000

tap
Guest VLAN 0
A NIC
socket

Guest VLAN 2
tap
B NIC
socket
 gPXE
Reboot the client machine with gpxe iso
image
http://rom-o-matic.net/
It worked, yeah!
Happiness didnt last long
 Final Step
Is it possible to start a VM that contains
just gpxe.
Reboot Guest in kitten/palacios
PCI NICs
o E1000 / rtl8139
DMA execution: the devices write to Guest physical
memory directly. (offset is needed)
o ne2k_pci (there is no gpxe iso image available)
ne2k_isa
o Requests from client are delivered, however the packets
sent from server are dropped
o Port I/O to receive the packets
o NIC device interrupt is not handled
Modification in Palacios
o v3_hook_passthrough_irq(...)
o v3_raise_irq(...)
A lot of thanks to Prof.Dinda and Lei Xia!