Booting with Xen on the J6

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Overview
This wiki describes how to boot a Dom0-enbaled 3.14 Linux kernel onto the J6 board with Xen. This is a virtualized Linux kernel booted on the J6. If you want to simply boot Linux natively on the J6 board, see Booting a Linux Kernel Natively on the J6.

Prerequisties
Your system must be setup according to the method outlined in System Setup. Also, it is recommended that you install the Xen tools, because these give you hooks into privileged system information not available from Dom0's context (e.g. total system memory, list of virtual machines, etc.), but this is not strictly required. See Setting Up Xen Tools for installing Xen Tools.

System Overview
These instructions were run and tested with the following software and hardware:
 * Board: J6 Eco
 * Chip: DRA72x
 * Laptop OS: Ubuntu 12.04 (64-bit)
 * Board OS: Ubuntu 14.04 (32-bit)
 * Cross-Compiler GCC Version: 4.6.3


 * UBoot:
 * Version: 2014.07-dirty
 * Release: 6AL.1.0
 * Linux Kernel:
 * Version: 3.14
 * Release: 6AL.1.0
 * Xen:
 * Version: 4.6-unstable (master branch)

For reference, we assume that the following environment variables are defined:

Build U-Boot
Build the U-Boot software:

Build the Dom0 Linux Kernel
Clean the build files, and generate the TI kernel configuration.

Add the following lines to the config file ${SW_DIR}/kernels/linux-3.14/.config:

xen_settings.config

Sync the changes to the config file and build the Linux 3.14 Dom0 (Xen-enabled) kernel and the ARM device tree for J6:

Build Xen
Build the Xen hypervisor:

Setup the Serial Console
Make sure that the ttyO0 console service is disabled, and the hvc0 console service is enabled:

Create the SD card image
Copy over the images to the micro SD card (note that your mount may have a different name):

Copy the core filesystem over only if you have changed it, or it is not present on the rootfs partition:

Boot the System
Attach a serial console to the J6 board (note the USB device may mounted under a different numbered ttyUSB):

Hit the reset button on the board (SW4), and press any key to prevent automatic booting. Then, enter the following commands to setup automatic booting of the kernel under Xen:

xen_boot.script

If you wish only to boot this once, then don't change the bootcmd environment variable, and instead run the contents of it directly to boot.

Next Steps
Now that Dom0 is up and running on the J6 board, we can now create DomU guests with the Xen Tools, if they are installed on the core filesystem.

To install the Xen Tools on the core filesystem, see Setting Up Xen Tools.

For creating Linux DomU guests, see Creating DomU Guests on the J6 Board.