andreiw / esxi_arm_uefi_less_vm

UEFI-less VM for ESXi-Arm Fling

UEFI-less VM in ESXi-Arm Fling

This is a simple example of running code in a "raw" VM without UEFI.

You start with:

• MMU off
• DTB in x0

Note: ESXi-Arm Fling is not a product and as such, anything can change without notice: virtual machine layout, virtual devices, hypervisor interfaces, etc.

Requirements

ESXi-Arm Fling 1.1.

Building

You need GCC, make, etc. Tested with gcc version 8.3.0 (Debian 8.3.0-2).

On Arm Linux:

$ make

On non-Arm Linux:

$ CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- make

Running

I just put the whole directory on an NFS exported path, and register demo.vmx directly. Of course, you could just copy demo.vmx, Image.bin and dummy.initrd to wherever you want.

If you do register the VM within the source directory, the make cleaner target will remove all the VMware stuff.

Now power on the VM. The VM will power itself off. The VM doesn't perform any video output, it just logs stuff to serial.0.log (corresponding to the serial port) and vmware.log.

$ cat serial.0.log

Hello UART!

We are 0xee98 bytes at 0000000080080000
Running on a 'arm,vmware-vbsa', 'linux,dummy-virt'
Hypervisor: 'vmware'
Passed command line: 'bootargs for Image.bin'
initrd-start = 0000000087ffffd8
initrd-end = 0000000088000000
Powering off...

$ _