Getting Started with StratoVirt

1. Prepare

• Host os

  You can run StratoVirt on both x86_64 and aarch64 platforms.

  And on top of that, the StratoVirt is based on KVM, so please make sure you have KVM module on your platform.

• Authority

  You should have read/write permissions to /dev/kvm. If not, you can get your permissions by:

  $ sudo setfacl -m u:${USER}:rw /dev/kvm

2. Get the StratoVirt Binary

StratoVirt is offerred by openEuler 20.09 or later. You can install by yum directly.

$ sudo yum install stratovirt

Now you can find StratoVirt binary with path: /usr/bin/stratovirt.

If you'd like to build StratoVirt yourself, you should check out the build_guide.

3. Run StratoVirt

With StratoVirt binary (either installed with yum, or built from source), we can boot a guest linux machine. Now StratoVirt provides two kinds of machine, which are microvm and standard_vm("q35" on x86_64 platform and "virt" on aarch64 platform). As a quick start, we show how to start a VM with microvm.

First, you will need an PE format Linux kernel binary, and an ext4 file system image (as rootfs).

• x86_64 boot source: kernel and rootfs.
• aarch64 boot source: kernel and rootfs.

Or get the kernel and rootfs with shell:

arch=`uname -m`
dest_kernel="vmlinux.bin"
dest_rootfs="rootfs.ext4"
image_bucket_url="https://repo.openeuler.org/openEuler-22.03-LTS/stratovirt_img"

if [ ${arch} = "x86_64" ] || [ ${arch} = "aarch64" ]; then
    kernel="${image_bucket_url}/${arch}/vmlinux.bin"
    rootfs="${image_bucket_url}/${arch}/openEuler-22.03-LTS-stratovirt-${arch}.img.xz"
else
    echo "Cannot run StratoVirt on ${arch} architecture!"
    exit 1
fi

echo "Downloading $kernel..."
wget ${kernel} -O ${dest_kernel} --no-check-certificate

echo "Downloading $rootfs..."
wget ${rootfs} -O ${dest_rootfs}.xz --no-check-certificate
xz -d ${dest_rootfs}.xz

echo "kernel file: ${dest_kernel} and rootfs image: ${dest_rootfs} download over."

Start guest linux machine with StratoVirt:

socket_path=`pwd`"/stratovirt.sock"
kernel_path=`pwd`"/vmlinux.bin"
rootfs_path=`pwd`"/rootfs.ext4"

# Make sure QMP can be created.
rm -f ${socket_path}

# Start linux VM with machine type "microvm" by StratoVirt.
/usr/bin/stratovirt \
    -machine microvm \
    -kernel ${kernel_path} \
    -smp 1 \
    -m 1024 \
    -append "console=ttyS0 pci=off reboot=k quiet panic=1 root=/dev/vda" \
    -drive file=${rootfs_path},id=rootfs,readonly=off,direct=off \
    -device virtio-blk-device,drive=rootfs,id=rootfs \
    -qmp unix:${socket_path},server,nowait \
    -serial stdio

You should now see a serial in stdio prompting you to log into the guest machine. If you used our openEuler-22.03-LTS-stratovirt.img image, you can login as root, using the password openEuler12#$.

If you want to quit the guest machine, using a reboot command inside the guest will actually shutdown StratoVirt. This is due to that StratoVirt didn't implement guest power management in microvm type.

If you want to know more information on running StratoVirt, go to the Configuration Guidebook.