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..
SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
Copyright (C) 2018, Bin Meng <bmeng.cn@gmail.com>
Copyright (C) 2021, Ahmad Fatoum
.. _virtio:
VirtIO Support
==============
This document describes the information about barebox support for VirtIO_
devices, including supported boards, build instructions, driver details etc.
What's VirtIO?
--------------
VirtIO is a virtualization standard for network and disk device drivers where
just the guest's device driver "knows" it is running in a virtual environment,
and cooperates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance
network and disk operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of
paravirtualization. In the barebox case, the guest is barebox itself, while the
virtual environment will normally be QEMU_ targets like ARM, RISC-V and x86.
Status
------
VirtIO can use various different buses, aka transports as described in the
spec. While VirtIO devices are commonly implemented as PCI devices on x86,
embedded devices models like ARM/RISC-V, which does not normally come with
PCI support might use simple memory mapped device (MMIO) instead of the PCI
device. The memory mapped virtio device behaviour is based on the PCI device
specification. Therefore most operations including device initialization,
queues configuration and buffer transfers are nearly identical. Only MMIO
is currently supported in barebox.
The VirtIO spec defines a lots of VirtIO device types, however at present only
block, console and RNG devices are supported.
Build Instructions
------------------
Building barebox for QEMU targets is no different from others.
For example, we can do the following with the CROSS_COMPILE environment
variable being properly set to a working toolchain for ARM::
$ make vexpress_defconfig
$ make
Testing
-------
The following QEMU command line is used to get barebox up and running with
a VirtIO console on ARM::
$ qemu-system-arm -m 256M -M virt -nographic \
-kernel ./images/barebox-dt-2nd.img \
-device virtio-serial-device \
-chardev socket,path=/tmp/foo,server,nowait,id=foo \
-device virtconsole,chardev=foo,name=console.foo
To access the console socket, you can use ``socat /tmp/foo -``.
Note the use of ``-kernel ./images/barebox-dt-2nd.img`` instead of
``-bios ./images/barebox-$BOARD.img``. ``-kernel`` will cause QEMU
to pass barebox a fixed-up device tree describing the ``virtio-mmio``
rings.
Except for the console, multiple instances of a VirtIO device can be created
by appending more '-device' parameters. For example to create one HWRNG
and 2 block devices::
$ qemu-system-arm -m 256M -M virt -nographic \
-kernel ./images/barebox-dt-2nd.img \
-device virtio-rng-device \
-drive if=none,file=/tmp/first.hdimg,format=raw,id=hd0 \
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
-drive if=none,file=/tmp/second.hdimg,format=raw,id=hd1 \
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd1
.. _VirtIO: http://docs.oasis-open.org/virtio/virtio/v1.0/virtio-v1.0.pdf
.. _qemu: https://www.qemu.org
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