DMAR is not present in Ubuntu

[Nakul Vyas]

Hi,

I was trying to run Jailhouse on real hardware "intel x86 based Shuttle XPC". But when I try to create configuration for this device, I found that DMAR is not present on my device. Please help !!! I really want to try this hypervisor.

Thanks for your help in advance!!!

Regards

Nakul Vyas

[Valentine Sinitsyn]

Hi,

Most likely, this means your board is missing VT-d, which is required
for Jailhouse to work on real hardware. Check your BIOS and/or manuals
for words like "IOMMU support (or VT-d itself). If it's missing, your
options are mostly limited to using QEMU nested virtualization or
getting another board. Upgrading BIOS may also help, but only if IOMMU
is physically present on the board.

HTH,
Valentine

[Nakul Vyas]

Hi,

I found that that my intel board is not supported with VT-d, but I have a raspberry Pi.  Did anybody tried Jailhouse on raspberry Pi. I see only Banana Pi support (why not raspberry pi), is Banana pi supported with something like VT-d /IOMMU.

warm regards,

Nakul Vyas

[Valentine Sinitsyn]

On 15.09.2015 17:52, Nakul Vyas wrote:
> I found that that my intel board is not supported with VT-d, but I have
> a raspberry Pi. Did anybody tried Jailhouse on raspberry Pi. I see only

IIRC, Raspberry Pi is missyng HYP support and can't run hypervisors
(except full or paravirtualized ones, which are not Jailhouse).

> Banana Pi support (why not raspberry pi), is Banana pi supported with
> something like VT-d /IOMMU.

Valentine

[Jan Kiszka]

On 2015-09-15 14:56, Valentine Sinitsyn wrote:
> On 15.09.2015 17:52, Nakul Vyas wrote:
>> I found that that my intel board is not supported with VT-d, but I have
>> a raspberry Pi. Did anybody tried Jailhouse on raspberry Pi. I see only
> IIRC, Raspberry Pi is missyng HYP support and can't run hypervisors
> (except full or paravirtualized ones, which are not Jailhouse).

Right, the Raspberry Pi 1 lacks virtualization support and the Pi 2 has
a broken hardware design - none are suitable for hardware-assisted
virtualization that Jailhouse is built for.

The cheapest supported device right now - even though it is not perfect
either due to lacking SMMU (IOMMU) - is indeed the Banana Pi 1 (there is
a newer version of the hardware, IIRC, but we didn't try that yet).

Jan

--
Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, CT RTC ITP SES-DE
Corporate Competence Center Embedded Linux

[Nakul Vyas]

Thanks for your response, but can you people elaborate "broken hardware" in raspberry pi 2. It is interesting for me to know this, because now I am thinking to Implement a SoC on FPGA (Altera DE 1 board) with ARM soft core. I think in this way also I can test Jailhouse on real hardware. The other alternative is to buy a new board, but for that too I must know what actual specifications I should look in new board. It is important to know exact hardware requirements as in future I may want to port Jailhouse on other processors (PowerPC etc.) as well. As such, I want to know what exact thing raspberry pi model 2 is missing.

Cheers !!!

[Jan Kiszka]

On 2015-09-16 11:05, Nakul Vyas wrote:
> Thanks for your response, but can you people elaborate "broken hardware"
> in raspberry pi 2. It is interesting for me to know this, because now I
> am thinking to Implement a SoC on FPGA (Altera DE 1 board) with ARM soft
> core. I think in this way also I can test Jailhouse on real hardware.
> The other alternative is to buy a new board, but for that too I must
> know what actual specifications I should look in new board. It is
> important to know exact hardware requirements as in future I may want to
> port Jailhouse on other processors (PowerPC etc.) as well. As such, I
> want to know what exact thing raspberry pi model 2 is missing.

The R-Pi2 lacks a virtualizable GIC but instead comes with the
non-standardized interrupt controller of the R-Pi1.

In general, we need hardware assistance for partitioning hardware
resources as we do not want to emulate all those things (reduced
complexity, much better latencies, thus suitability for real-time).

[Vineesh Kumar]

jailhouse hardware preliminary hardware requirement says VT-d support is required. But in the software requirement asked to disable VT-d(IOMMU)
How does this DMAR reference work.

[Jan Kiszka]

You need VT-d to be on and detect by Linux while running "jailhouse
config create", but only then. Once you obtained a config, switch IOMMU
support off, only leave interrupt remapping on (that's not a must, just
an optimization).

As you asked offlist: VT-d is a mandatory feature for Jailhouse on x86
by now. You can hack the code to make it optional again, but that may
break things in unexpected ways and prevents device assignment to
non-root cells.

HTH,
Jan
--
Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, CT RDA ITP SES-DE