Xen to run Manjaro and Raspbian

[marawuti]

Sorry if this a dupe of prior questions about hypervisor implementations on Pine hardware.

Has anyone out there installed the Xen hypervisor on the Pinebook Pro then reinstalled Manjaro?

I don't want to reinvent the wheel.  I'd like to be able to run customized images of Raspbian in a virtualizer not an emulator.

Just found be Pinebook Pro and it looks quite promising.  Also am looking to replace Presario running Linux as my alternate to Windoz platform for the household, also, again, the Pinebook Pro looks like a no-brainer.

[astr0baby]

Sorry if this a dupe of prior questions about hypervisor implementations on Pine hardware.

Has anyone out there installed the Xen hypervisor on the Pinebook Pro then reinstalled Manjaro?

I don't want to reinvent the wheel.  I'd like to be able to run customized images of Raspbian in a virtualizer not an emulator.

Just found be Pinebook Pro and it looks quite promising.  Also am looking to replace Presario running Linux as my alternate to Windoz platform for the household, also, again, the Pinebook Pro looks like a no-brainer.

Im sure you are not reinventing a wheel here, you can read about aarch64 and XEN here :
https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_ARM...Extensions
and make conclusions on how easy/difficult it would be to port it to the Pinebookpro

To me a relatively easy way to do what you want is through KVM accelerated Qemu

[tophneal]

Porting may not be necessary, Xen is in the AUR.

[astr0baby]

Porting may not be necessary, Xen is in the AUR.

Are you sure this would work on aarch64 Pinebookpro ?  To me this looks more like a x86 centric port.

[tophneal]

I’m not entirely sure, no. But Xen cites itself as having ARM support already, and is in the AUR. If the Xen in the AUR is only x86, it’s still likely possible to build on the PBP by editing the pkgbuild. I’d try it out myself, but I’d have to make another Manjaro SD first.

Read a little more into this on the Arch wiki, and I'm probably wrong about the porting, but it looks like there's a pretty quick way to see if it's possible to run Xen on aarch64:

To run HVM domU, the physical hardware must have either Intel VT-x or AMD-V (SVM) virtualization support. In order to verify this, run the following command when the Xen hypervisor is not running:

Code:

$ grep -E "(vmx|svm)" --color=always /proc/cpuinfo

If the above command does not produce output, then hardware virtualization support is unavailable and your hardware is unable to run HVM domU (or you are already running the Xen hypervisor).

[astr0baby]

I’m not entirely sure, no. But Xen cites itself as having ARM support already, and is in the AUR. If the Xen in the AUR is only x86, it’s still likely possible to build on the PBP by editing the pkgbuild. I’d try it out myself, but I’d have to make another Manjaro SD first.

Read a little more into this on the Arch wiki, and I'm probably wrong about the porting, but it looks like there's a pretty quick way to see if it's possible to run Xen on aarch64:

To run HVM domU, the physical hardware must have either Intel VT-x or AMD-V (SVM) virtualization support. In order to verify this, run the following command when the Xen hypervisor is not running:

Code:

$ grep -E "(vmx|svm)" --color=always /proc/cpuinfo

If the above command does not produce output, then hardware virtualization support is unavailable and your hardware is unable to run HVM domU (or you are already running the Xen hypervisor).

There are no vmx nor svm flags on the Pinebookpro in /proc/cpuinfo

only
fp asmid evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid

[tophneal]

I’m not entirely sure, no. But Xen cites itself as having ARM support already, and is in the AUR. If the Xen in the AUR is only x86, it’s still likely possible to build on the PBP by editing the pkgbuild. I’d try it out myself, but I’d have to make another Manjaro SD first.

Read a little more into this on the Arch wiki, and I'm probably wrong about the porting, but it looks like there's a pretty quick way to see if it's possible to run Xen on aarch64:

To run HVM domU, the physical hardware must have either Intel VT-x or AMD-V (SVM) virtualization support. In order to verify this, run the following command when the Xen hypervisor is not running:

Code:

$ grep -E "(vmx|svm)" --color=always /proc/cpuinfo

If the above command does not produce output, then hardware virtualization support is unavailable and your hardware is unable to run HVM domU (or you are already running the Xen hypervisor).

There are no vmx nor svm flags on the Pinebookpro in /proc/cpuinfo

only
fp asmid evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid

Yeah, once I saw those flag requirements, I knew I was in the wrong. OP will likely need to explorer other options.

EDIT:

I'm in the midst of updating Fedora on the PBP and it appears it already includes Xen. There's also Xen pkgs for aarch64 available here: https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=xen
Xen on aarch64 may be a possibility, though it might have some restrictions given those required flags.

[simba]

I’m not entirely sure, no. But Xen cites itself as having ARM support already, and is in the AUR. If the Xen in the AUR is only x86, it’s still likely possible to build on the PBP by editing the pkgbuild. I’d try it out myself, but I’d have to make another Manjaro SD first.

Read a little more into this on the Arch wiki, and I'm probably wrong about the porting, but it looks like there's a pretty quick way to see if it's possible to run Xen on aarch64:

To run HVM domU, the physical hardware must have either Intel VT-x or AMD-V (SVM) virtualization support. In order to verify this, run the following command when the Xen hypervisor is not running:

Code:

$ grep -E "(vmx|svm)" --color=always /proc/cpuinfo

If the above command does not produce output, then hardware virtualization support is unavailable and your hardware is unable to run HVM domU (or you are already running the Xen hypervisor).

There are no vmx nor svm flags on the Pinebookpro in /proc/cpuinfo

only
fp asmid evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid

Yeah, once I saw those flag requirements, I knew I was in the wrong. OP will likely need to explorer other options.

EDIT:

I'm in the midst of updating Fedora on the PBP and it appears it already includes Xen. There's also Xen pkgs for aarch64 available here: https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=xen
Xen on aarch64 may be a possibility, though it might have some restrictions given those required flags.

Accodring to the Xen development Wiki, the Rockchip 3399 used in PBP is capable of running Xen[/url]. There are also [url=https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_ARM_with_Virtualization_Extensions/Ibox3399]instructions for a specific board with this chip.

[wwtaylor]

I know you mentioned Xen, and although Xen is neat, if you don't NEED Xen (which based on the context of your post I am not sure why you'd need specifically Xen), you might have better luck with KVM: https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Processor_support#ARM: