Initial booting

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Hi All,

Hope that everyone is safe and doing well today.

After some work and with the help of Adrian, who I thank so very much, I was able to build the 85MB ISO of Muen.

I basically have 2 systems to work with:

1. an AMD64 Bit Pavilion A10 smaller, and older, desktop with 18GB RAM and 2TB HDD

2. Dell PowerEdge C6220 SFF 4 Node Server 8x Xeon E5-2650 256GB RAM 4x 2TB 2.5" HD

Of course, it seems that Muen is not yet ready for AMD's so I booted the iso onto one of my Intel Xeon nodes which seemed to boot the iso, run through some checks and then automatically reboot. Not sure that this is the intended operation, but that's what is happening.

On this note, I was wondering if Muen will have AMD support anytime soon and perhaps support for my Intel Xeon's if that was not the intended outcome from what I saw with booting the small ISO as I really would like to be able to use Muen on a number of different systems, AMD and Intel alike?

Cheers,

Lonnie

[Adrian-Ken Rueegsegger]

Hello Lonnie,

On 4/1/20 9:20 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Hope that everyone is safe and doing well today.
>
> After some work and with the help of Adrian, who I thank so very much, I
> was able to build the 85MB ISO of Muen.
>
> I basically have 2 systems to work with:
>
> 1. an AMD64 Bit Pavilion A10 smaller, and older, desktop with 18GB RAM and
> 2TB HDD
>
> 2. Dell PowerEdge C6220 SFF 4 Node Server 8x Xeon E5-2650 256GB RAM 4x 2TB
> 2.5" HD
>
> Of course, it seems that Muen is not yet ready for AMD's so I booted the
> iso onto one of my Intel Xeon nodes which seemed to boot the iso, run
> through some checks and then automatically reboot. Not sure that this is
> the intended operation, but that's what is happening.

Muen Systems are built for a specific hardware platform. A so called
hardware specification is required when building a Muen system. Such a
hardware spec defines what resources and devices a given platform
provides, e.g. amount of memory and the various PCI devices.
The HARDWARE environment variable specifies for which hardware platform
a Muen system should be built. The Muen repository contains a selection
of hardware specs that are known to work, which are located in
policy/hardware.

The mugenhwcfg tool [1] can be used to assist in generating a Muen
hardware configuration file from a running Linux system. Maybe you can
also give mugenhwcfg-live [2] a try, which was published very recently.

> On this note, I was wondering if Muen will have AMD support anytime soon
> and perhaps support for my Intel Xeon's if that was not the intended
> outcome from what I saw with booting the small ISO as I really would like
> to be able to use Muen on a number of different systems, AMD and Intel
> alike?

Server systems are a bit tricky. We have Muen running on Intel server
hardware with some adjustments but it doesn't work out of the box. The
safest bet would be to try Muen on one of the supported hardware platforms.

As for AMD: we do not plan to add support for AMD systems.

Best regards,
Adrian

[1] - https://git.codelabs.ch/?p=muen/mugenhwcfg.git
[2] - https://github.com/roburio/mugenhwcfg-live/

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Thanks Adrian for the very useful information on Muen as I am still slowly getting up to speed on things.

One thing that you mentioned was that Muen is hardware specific and that there were no plans to add AMD support.

In just a side question, and in a general ballpark way, I was wondering what it might take to actually add AMD support, although I do obviously see that it would require a huge amount of work and time before that could be accomplished. Mostly just trying to get a feel for things on that potential side as well since I sincerely plan to push forward my project this time without delays and am sort of going through a "wish-list" of things that I would like to possibly see in the project.

Cheers and have a great weekend,

Lonnie

[Adrian-Ken Rueegsegger]

Hello Lonnie,

On 4/3/20 5:46 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Thanks Adrian for the very useful information on Muen as I am still slowly
> getting up to speed on things.
>
> One thing that you mentioned was that Muen is hardware specific and that
> there were no plans to add AMD support.
>
> In just a side question, and in a general ballpark way, I was
> wondering what it might take to actually add AMD support, although I do
> obviously see that it would require a huge amount of work and time
> before that could be accomplished. Mostly just trying to get a feel for
> things on that potential side as well since I sincerely plan to push
> forward my project this time without delays and am sort of going through a
> "wish-list" of things that I would like to possibly see in the project.

It's hard to gauge since I am not familiar with AMDs virtualization
extensions. You would need to identify the corresponding AMD alternative
to the Intel VT-x/VT-d mechanisms we currently use in Muen. Depending on
how good seamlessly the AMD variant can replace the current
implementation, you would need to remove and re-implement the
Intel-specific parts. A detailed and thorough understanding of AMD
Virtualization and the IOMMU would be required. I assume that aside from
the general and apparent differences, there might subtle differences
which would need to be considered very carefully.

Sorry for not being more specific but I don't feel comfortable giving an
estimate without having investigated the issue in detail.

Regards,
Adrian