ncrmro / gondola

Ansible playbook to set up a emulated Raspberry Pi OS in KVM with minimal hassle.

Gondola

Description

This project should provide an ansible playbook that provisions a emulated raspberry pi virtual machine on the local KVM machine.

A quick over view, this project gets the following files in the table bellow, converts the .img file to .qcow2 (allows us to snapshot guest) and puts the files in your libvirt images folder. Then creates the kvm guest and an initial snapshot. From there you can clone that initial image for development related tasks.

File	Purpose
2020-05-27-raspios-buster-lite-armhf.img	The image containng the operating system
kernel-qemu-4.19.50-buster	The kernal
versatile-pb-buster.dtb	The device tree blob

You can instead use stretch by uncommenting that section in ./vars.yml, buster has issues installing docker ATM.

Installation

Make sure you have libvirt-dev and qemu-system-arm installed as well.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

sh main.sh

At this point you should be able to ping your pi

ping raspberrypi.local

You might drop into the guest and enable openssh-server username is pi password is raspberry

Expand the disk sudo raspi-config --expand-rootfs

Enable openssh-server sudo raspi-config

Then enable the openssh-server

And then from your host machine

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub [e-mail]

Now you should be able ssh in.

ssh [e-mail]

Best to take a snapshot while we are here.

virsh snapshot-create-as --domain pi __name "host_ssh_key_added_to_pi_user"

Do any more processing to the base image that you would like, idealy before you deploy these images in the wild you add maybe ufw and fail2ban

Now lets create your actual image you'll use for which ever project your working on.

Power off your machine if it isn't already.

Now lets clone, change my_dev_pi to what ever you need it to be.

virt-clone --original pi --auto-clone -n my_dev_pi

Once your ready to run your image on physical hardware.

Shut down the vm if it is started.

virsh destroy pi

Convert .qcow2 back to .img

qemu-img convert /var/lib/libvirt/images/2020-05-27-raspios-buster-lite-armhf.qcow2 -O raw ~/Downloads/disk.img

Roadmap

• Ansible Setup with Connection to Specified Host - Hello World
  • Make sure KVM NAT network is accessible with DNS
• Download Raspberry Pi Image
• Download the necessary kernals
• Asnible Jinja Templete Libvirt Guest XML
• Initial provision of SSH key and any required packages
  • Clone the VM this guest can be developed against.
  • Dump Image to Be burned to USB
• Develop Image (our Firmware)
• Create a Firmware Release (qcow2 back to bootable image)

Resizing Disk Ver2

The stretch image for some reason wont expand using the sudo raspi-config --expand-rootfs the instructions below are from this article.

Instead open the disk in fsdisk

sudo fdisk /dev/vda

Then hit the following

Press 'd' > Enter

Press '2' > Enter

Now re-create it:

Press 'n' > Enter

Press 'p' > Enter

Press '2' > Enter

For the first sector take the start number of /dev/vda2 for the last sector use the provided value which should be the
full disk size

sudo shutdown -r now

sudo resize2fs /dev/vda

Credits

• Using QEMU to emulate a Raspberry Pi
• qemu-rpi-kernel
• My Blog post about this project here