Deploying a KVM (x86_64) Device¶

Warning

This chapter discusses a model of device support which is being superceded by the pipeline model.

Adding a KVM device to LAVA is an easy way to make sure things work without having to worry about connecting to a physical device and setting up a master image. This page outlines the steps required to add a new KVM device to your LAVA deployment and make it able to accept job requests.

Obtain an image¶

A variety of pre-built images are available for download:

http://images.validation.linaro.org/kvm/

Building KVM images for LAVA¶

If the prebuilt images are not suitable, new images can be built using vmdebootstrap. See also Deploying an image to a device.

Note

image building tools are constantly developing and this guide can easily become out of date, so you will need to read the manpages for the tools and update the instructions appropiately.

sudo apt install vmdebootstrap

The default distribution is Debian stable.

Example invocation:

$ sudo vmdebootstrap --image=myimage.img --verbose --serial-console --enable-dhcp

To run the test image, use the --owner=$(whoami) option to vmdebootstrap or make sure it is writeable:

$ sudo chmod a+w ./myimage.img

Execute using qemu, e.g. on amd64 using qemu-system-x86_64:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 ./myimage.img

Newer versions of qemu will complain about the format, so check the manpage and use something like:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 -enable-kvm -drive format=raw,file=./myimage.img

See man 1 vmdebootstrap and man qemu-system for more information.

Adding a KVM device to LAVA¶

You can use the Instance name support:

$ sudo /usr/share/lava-server/add_device.py kvm kvm01

Add the root_part = 1 line to the device configuration
Configure Optional: networking configuration

Configure the dispatcher manually¶

Create your kvm01.conf file with the following content:

device_type = kvm
root_part = 1

Sample job file (replace file:///path/to/kvm.img with the actual location where you placed the image you created in the previous step):

{
  "timeout": 18000,
  "job_name": "kvm-test",
  "device_type": "kvm",
  "target": "kvm01",
  "actions": [
    {
      "command": "deploy_linaro_image",
      "parameters": {
        "image": "file:///path/to/kvm.img"