User:Idella4/Xen arm howto

ARCH ARM IN XEN

Support for the arm arch in xen began with the 4.3.0 release mid 2013. It was provisional support for only 2 of the arm boards. The arm boards are single control boards (SCB) and represent the first expansion from the x86 and x86_64 arches. At the time of writing. the development of support of xen is still under heavy active development and will remain a wotk in progress for many months.

The elements and packages that constitute xen capbility on arm are:

1. Kernel support

2. Device tree file

3. The bootloader u-boot

This HowTo cover the requirements to boot into dom0 in one selected sample arm SCB, the cubieboard2, a new generation 'light weight' model released also around mid 2013. This guide provides a working model of an effective setup that boots a dom0. By their nature, specs of the various arm boards demand settings to match the all the above constituents.

Key differences

The traditional boot into dom0 in x86(_64) is via the std. bzImage or vmlinuz kernel image + the xen.gz file via the linux & multiboot cmd in a menu entry of grub2. With arm, the kernel image saved to /boot is a zImage coupled with a device tree file generated in the build of the kernel via 1 choice of options via u-boot, an entirely different booting package which is likewise also under heavy development.