[virt-tools-list] virt-install command line for installing Fedora 21 guest on aarch64

[Cole Robinson]

On 08/03/2014 10:38 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> I was able to get some way into the install using the following
> command line:
> 
> virt-install \
>   -n f21 \
>   --machine=virt \
>   --cpu=host \
>   --vcpus=1 \
>   -r 2048 \
>   --os-variant=fedora20 \
>   --disk path=/dev/vg_ssd/f21,bus=virtio \
>   -l *see below* \
>   -x 'console=ttyAMA0 earlyprintk=pl011,0x9000000 ignore_loglevel'
> 
> Notes:
> 
> * --machine=virt is required: See my previous post on this mailing list.
> 

Yep, we should make this the default, possibly for plain arm32 as well.

> * bus=virtio: You must use this because IDE (the default) is not
>   available on ARM.

This should be a small fix to teach virtinst that arm + machine=virt can do
virtio.

  I couldn't work out how to use virtio-scsi, which
>   would be my preferred choice.
> 

With qemu or virt-install? The virt-install invocation should be

--controller scsi,model=virtio-scsi
--disk path=FOO,bus=scsi

> * console=ttyAMA0: This is the serial console (PL011) which qemu -M
>   virt emulates.  There is no graphical display AFAIK.
> 
> * earlyprintk=pl011,0x9000000: This enables early kernel messages,
>   which can be very useful.  "pl011,0x9000000" tells it to write the
>   messages directly out to the PL011 serial port at the fixed
>   memory-mapped address 0x9000000.
> 
> Finally about the location (-l flag): Unfortunately there are no
> composes of Fedora for aarch64.  In other words there is no location
> URL where virt-install can download the pxeboot kernel & initramfs
> which it uses to net-install a guest.  [Peter: Am I right about this?]
> 
> We happen to have one internally at Red Hat which I'm using for
> testing, but that's not at a public URL unfortunately, and also it has
> a broken kernel that doesn't have all the patches required to run
> under virt.
> 
> Also: I have patched my copy of qemu with this not-upstream-yet patch:
> 
> http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/375937/
> 

Thanks for the info!

- Cole