Re: [meta-virtualization] Building xen-image-minimal for RPi4 Compute Module

["Bruce Ashfield" <bruce.ashfield@gmail.com>]

Sorry for the slow reply,

On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 11:45 PM Patrick Godwin <pbg.dev@outlook.com> wrote:
>
> I'm in the process of building xen-image-minimal for my Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module and am hitting some issues when running the image on physical hardware. Upon inspecting the boot partition of the sd-card, I noticed that the image only contained the dtb for the Raspberry Pi 4B; this makes sense when I look at xen-raspberrypi4-64.inc:
>

Not sure if you've sorted this out yet.

We do have reference images that booted on the RPI, but I can't say that I've
been testing them myself. I'm hoping that my reply will catch the attention of
those that do have the h/w and they can comment in more detail.

>     # Override the meta-raspberrypi default kernel preference
>     PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel ?= "linux-yocto"
>     KERNEL_DEVICETREE ?= "broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb"
>
> Compared with the device tree blobs declared in meta-raspberrypi's raspberrypi4-64.conf:
>
>     RPI_KERNEL_DEVICETREE = " \
>         broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb \
>         broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-400.dtb \
>         broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-cm4.dtb \
>     "
>
> Looking into it further, it seems that the device tree listing in the kernel used in the xen-image-minimal build doesn't contain the newer firmware blobs contained in meta-raspberrypi, which causes devices like ethernet to fail to start up when the image finally boots.
>

There's a different level of support on the h/w between linux-yocto and the
'vendor' rpi tree. We use linux-yocto for the core enablement because the
branches are stable/not rebased and have a cadence we can predict (all
mentioned things are breakages we've hit before!).

That being said, you can change the kernel provider to the linux-rpi, and
the rest of the meta-virt settings, etc, are still applicable and should work.

> I've tried adding the bcm2711-rpi-cm4 firmware blob to the SD card manually, but that causes u-boot to fail with the error "Bad Linux ARM64 Image Magic!" after the Boot Xen step in output. I also tried manually replacing the bootfiles written by the xen sd card image with the latest blobs from meta-raspberrypi's packages, but once the OS boots I find that xen is no longer running, making me suspect I screwed up the configuration somewhere.
>

It could be a kernel configuration issue between the two images, if
the Xen packages are on the image, but nothing is running. Can you
interact with the Xen support via the xen cli at all ? Just to get a
better error message ?

> Is this something I can trivially fix? Is there a way for me to override the device tree selection used by the minimal xen image in my local.conf? Or do I need to investigate patching one of the meta-virtualization recipes?

Anything that needs changing, should be overridable via variable or
through bbappends, so hopefully no patching is required.

Bruce

>
> (Apologies if I've used any of the wrong lingo/terms here; still new to RasPi/Yocto/Xen :D)
>
>
> 
>


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