xen (Xen on AArch64)

8.1.4. xen (Xen on AArch64)#

This BSP enables RTEMS to run as a guest virtual machine in AArch64 mode on the Xen hypervisor for ARMv8 platforms.

Drivers:

  • Clock: ARMv8-AR Generic Timer

  • Console: Virtual PL011 device

  • Interrupt: GICv2

BSP variants:

  • xen: completely virtualized guest with no dependence on underlying hardware

The xen BSP relies on standard Xen features, so it should be able to run on any ARMv8 platform. This BSP supports SMP if RTEMS_SMP=True is set and the Xen domU configuration file has more than one vCPU allocated.

Xen allows for the passthrough of hardware peripherals to guest virtual machines. BSPs could be added in the future targeting specific hardware platforms and include the appropriate drivers.

This BSP was tested with Xen running on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC using the Petalinux distribution.

8.1.4.1. Execution#

This procedure describes how to run the ticker sample application that should already be built with the BSP.

The ticker.exe file can be found in the BSP build tree at:

aarch64/xen/testsuites/samples/ticker.exe

The ticker.exe elf file must be translated to a binary format.

aarch64-rtems7-objcopy -O binary ticker.exe ticker.bin

Then place the ticker.bin file on the dom0 filesystem.

From the dom0 console, create a configuration file ticker.cfg with the following contents.

name = "ticker"
kernel = "ticker.bin"
memory = 8
vcpus = 1
gic_version = "v2"
vuart = "sbsa_uart"

Create the virtual machine and attach to the virtual vpl011 console.

xl create ticker.cfg && xl console -t vuart ticker

To return back to the dom0 console, press both Ctrl and ] on your keyboard.

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