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Bare Metal Setup
This page shows how to get a x86-64 + aarch64 bare metal setup.
Running on bare metal is same as running on VMs just that we have to instrument the kernels to match kernel versions of source and destination and their CGROUP config. This is already done for the emulated environment setup found here. Bare metal testing requires a x86-64 CPU and an ARM board. This page will show how to setup the test environment with an Intel/AMD CPU along with a Raspberry Pi.
We need to install Ubuntu 20.04 server instance on the Raspberry Pi, it can be found in this tutorial.
On x86-64, assuming the server is running Ubuntu 20.04 we can either install a pre-instrumented kernel or build our own kernel.
Download the Linux Kernel Debian Packages from here into a local directory. In a terminal, stay in the directory and run
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
This will install the kernel on the machine. Run sudo update-grub and restart the machine with the new kernel.
After restarting, output of the following two commands should match on your Raspberry Pi and the local machine.
cat /boot/config-$(uname -r) | grep CGROUP
cat /proc/self/cgroup
If the outputs match, the bare metal test environment is correctly setup and tests can be run on this environment same as on the VMs.
It might happen that the drivers used by the kernel package provided above might not work on your local system correctly, in that case one has to build their own kernel. We will now show how to build a custom kernel. As previously mentioned, the goal of building our own kernel is to match CGROUPs. We want to match the output of the following two commands on both the machines:
cat /boot/config-$(uname -r) | grep CGROUP
cat /proc/self/cgroup
Download a linux kernel v5.4 tarball from here and extract or run
git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git
to clone the linux repository and then run
git checkout v5.4
Next go the the linux local repository and run:
make localmodconfig
This will create a config file same as the config file of the kernel you are currently running. This is an important step to create a config file that builds all the correct modules for your hardware.
Next on your Raspberry Pi run the command:
cat /boot/config-$(uname -r) | grep CGROUP
Open the .config file created on the local linux repository and make sure to match all the lines related to CGROUPS inside the config file to look same as the output printed on the Raspberry Pi.
Next, again on your Raspberry Pi, run the following command:
cat /proc/self/cgroup
On the local linux repository, run:
make menuconfig
Navigate to General Setup --> Control Group Support and uncheck all the extra Control Groups which are not printed by the command executed on the Raspberry Pi.
Once this is done, exit the menuconfig UI and save the changes.
Now the configuration is setup, to build the kernel run:
make -j4 deb-pkg
This will take a while as it will build the entire kernel for your machine and generate debian packages (files that end with .deb)
Place the debian packages in another directory and then follow the steps mentioned in the Pre-instrumented Kernel section of this page to install and setup the test environment.