Usecases/XenOnTCG

Running Xen under TCG emulation

You might want to do this is you are debugging the hypervisor which is tricky to do on a real machine. While Xen supports x86 and ARM architectures for TCG emulation we are only concerned with ARM as the x86 emulation support for virtualization is limited and only lightly tested.

Traditional Boot

The normal boot sequence is:

• Firmware/BIOS (e.g. EDK2) - which loads..
• Grub2 - which loads both Xen and the Kernel (via xen_hypervisor/xen_module) - which the boots...
• Xen - which boots and then loads the Dom0 kernel

So for this to work you want a boot using firmware (-drive pflash) with virtualisation enabled:

 qemu-system-aarch64 -cpu cortex-a57 -machine type==virt,virtualization=on,gic-version=3 \
   -display none -serial mon:stdio -netdev user,id=unet,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
   -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=unet,id=virt-net,disable-legacy=on \
   -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=virt-scsi,disable-legacy=on \
   -blockdev driver=raw,node-name=hd,discard=unmap,file.driver=host_device,file.filename=/dev/zen-disk/debian-buster-arm64 \
   -device scsi-hd,drive=hd,id=virt-scsi-hd \
   -drive if=pflash,file=/usr/share/AAVMF/AAVMF_CODE.fd,format=raw,readonly \
   -drive if=pflash,file=/home/alex/models/qemu-arm64-efivars,format==raw \
   -smp 1 -m 4096