How to install and use KVM within AGL on a mixed-critical Renesas R-Car M3

1. Build AGL with Virtual Open Systems KVM patch

The KVM support for Renesas R-Car M3 is integrated in the open source AGL distribution. Therefore, a standard AGL build for the R-Car M3 can be used for the purpose of this guide.

The AGL community provides step by step instructions to build a new image for Renesas R-Car M3 and R-Car H3. It has to be paid attention to download the AGL "Master Branch" in the download AGL source code and to target m3ulcb machine type in the section "Build for R Car Starter Kit gen3", as it is done in the following example:

$ repo init -u https://gerrit.automotivelinux.org/gerrit/AGL/AGL-repo
$ repo sync
$ source meta-agl/scripts/aglsetup.sh -m m3ulcb -b build agl-devel agl-demo agl-netboot agl-appfw-smack agl-localdev
$ bitbake agl-demo-platform

That would download and build from scratch the latest AGL sources; depending on the hardware configuration and on the connection speed after some time, the kernel binaries and the root file system will be available in the build/tmp/deploy/images/m3ulcb folder of the working directory.

Once done, follow the Automotive Grade Linux guide at the section Booting AGL Image on R-Car Starter Kit Gen3 boards using a microSD card to complete the installation of the binaries in the M3 microSD card.

At this point, everything is ready to start the build of the required software dependencies. For the purpose of the build operation, in the next sections we will use Docker to compile QEMU and the virtual machine kernel/rootfs. Therefore before proceeding further, make sure to have Docker available in the system; then create a new container with the following command:

$ docker run -e CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- \
     -it -d --name agl-kvm-guide -v $PWD:/home  \
     ubuntu:17.10 /bin/bash

The container is now ready, so we can proceed to the next section.

2. Statically build QEMU for aarch64

The KVM hypervisor needs the userspace QEMU emulator to create machine models abstractions for the guests. QEMU and its dependencies are not automatically installed in the AGL distribution. For this reason, in this section we will compile a static image of QEMU.

To do this, we will use Docker and a script prepared by Virtual Open Systems. Download it in the working directory and run the following command to launch its execution in the container created in the previous section:

$ docker exec -it agl-kvm-guide /home/VOSYS_qemu_static_cross_compile.sh

At the end of the execution, the qemu-system-aarch64 binary file will be placed in the current folder. Copy this file in a USB pen-drive, since it will be needed later in the R-Car M3.

At this point everything is almost ready to execute virtual machines in the R-Car M3. In the next section the guest kernel and rootfs will be prepared.

3. Preparation of the guest kernel and rootfs

In order to boot a functional KVM VM, a kernel and a rootfs image will be created. In particular, this guide builds an Ubuntu Xenial virtual machine to be run on top of AGL through KVM.