[Barrelfish-users] Run barrelfish on arm-architecture in Qemu

[Kornilios Kourtis]

Hi Daniel,

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 01:41:13PM +0200, Daniel Röhrig wrote:
> Hi Stefan,
> 
> we are getting a bit desperate running in all kinds of problems trying
> to create a working environment for barrelfish. Three people with
> different OS (Debian unstable, Ubuntu Precise, Gentoo) have either
> - failed to install the right cabal or the right ghc version (Ubuntu,
>   you can either have the right ghc version or a cabal installed
>   ghc-paths but not both),
> - could do a hake on the source code but couldn't get "make" to work
>   properly (Debian unstable, with a bunch of different Toolchains from
>   Linaro to Code Sourcery to self-compiled)
> - or could hake and make barrelfish but couldn't start it with qemu
>   (Gentoo)
> 
> If you really, really want to make our day - and I know this a lot to
> ask for -, please try to set up a fresh debian stable, ubuntu or even
> gentoo and if it works please tell us what to do so that we can
> reproduce your steps and finally start working on our project.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to test for all possible build environments
out there. So our approach is to choose a specific toolchain (usually
from a specific Ubuntu version) and work with that. It seems that our
toolchain has grow old, and we plan to move to newer versions at some
point. Also, since most development happens for x86, ARM is not in the
best possible state, but we are also working on that.

That being said, I have a patch for building barrelfish on a debian unstable
(recently upgraded). Note that the patch has some ugly hacks, and is intended
as something temporary.

Here are the steps for running memtest on qemu:
$ hg clone http://hg.barrelfish.org/
$ cd hg.barrelfish.org
$ wget -O - http://people.inf.ethz.ch/akourtis/patches/bf-debian-unstable.patch | patch -p1
$ cd ..
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ../hg.barrelfish.org/hake/hake.sh -i . -s ../hg.barrelfish.org -a arm
$ make
$ echo "module /arm/sbin/memtest" >> arm/menu.lst
$ make sim
Barrelfish CPU driver starting on ARMv5 Board id 0x00000113
...
memtest passed successfully! on core 0

cheers,
Kornilios.

-- 
Kornilios Kourtis