OpenBSD arm64 on QEMU with networking

With the increasing popularity of ARM64/AArch64 systems, from the Raspberry Pi 3 and PINE64 to Fujitsu’s move away from SPARC64 supercomputers, there hasn’t been a better time to get started with learning this architecture.

I wanted to make a start to an Aarch64 assembly language tutorial but didn’t have access to my RPi3, so I looked into the state of QEMU’s emulation. I didn’t need RPi3-specific hardware - which is just as well as I can’t remember off-hand how the bootcode and start.elf crap would work with QEMU - anyway, I opted for a generic device using Linaro’s EDK2 UEFI firmware.

The first pre-built EDK2 binary I downloaded wouldn’t play nicely with the OpenBSD kernel so I grabbed a release mentioned by the FreeBSD team - which worked.

Prerequisites

• OpenBSD/amd64 host
• miniroot64.fs (arm64)
• QEMU_EFI.fd (v16.02)
• QEMU (doas pkg_add qemu)

Network Prep

The procedure here is pretty much identical to that outlined in faq16. We create a vether0 and bridge0 interface for our tap interface to NAT through egress.

$ doas su -
# echo 'inet 192.168.54.1 255.255.255.0 NONE' >/etc/hostname.vether0
# echo 'add vether0' >/etc/hostname.bridge0
# sh /etc/netstart vether0 
# sh /etc/netstart bridge0 
# sysctl net.inet.ip.forwarding=1

Add the following rule to /etc/pf.conf (replace egress if necessary with your network_interface:0):

match out on egress from vether0:network to any nat-to (egress)

Reload our pf configuration:

# pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf

Create /etc/dhcpd.conf so your VM can use dhcp:

option domain-name "cryogenix.net"
option domain-name-servers 1.1.1.1;

subnet 192.168.54.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
	option routers 192.168.54.1;
	range 192.168.54.100 192.168.54.199;
}

Start dhcpd:

# rcctl -f start dhcpd

Preparing QEMU

Fetch miniroot64.fs, SHA256, SHA256.sig, and QEMU_EFI.fd:

$ ftp https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.4/arm64/{SHA256,SHA256.sig,miniroot64.fs}
$ ftp http://releases.linaro.org/components/kernel/uefi-linaro/16.02/release/qemu64/QEMU_EFI.fd 
$ signify -Cp /etc/signify/openbsd-64-base.pub -x SHA256.sig miniroot64.fs

Create a qcow2 image to use as our disk:

$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 root.qcow2 10G

Booting miniroot64.fs

Thanks to jsg@ for the -M and -device arguments to use instead of -M raspi3.

doas sh -c "qemu-system-aarch64 -runas $USER \
-m 2048 \
-M virt \
-cpu cortex-a57 \
-bios QEMU_EFI.fd \
-device virtio-rng-device \
-drive file=miniroot64.fs,format=raw,id=drive1 \
-netdev tap,id=net0 -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
-drive file=root.qcow2,if=none,id=drive0,format=qcow2 \
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=drive0 \
-nographic \
-serial tcp::4450,server,telnet,wait"

In another terminal (hello, tmux!):

$ telnet localhost 4450
>> OpenBSD/arm64 BOOTAA64 0.13
boot>

Proceed to install OpenBSD as normal; at set selection -x* -g* is recommended. To boot into your new system, remove the line with miniroot64.fs from the command above and perhaps saving the full command as a shell script for your convenience. We don’t need the serial console anymore if you elected to start sshd at boot, so the -serial line could either be removed or changed to ‘-serial FILE:serial.log’.

Tue Nov 13 16:43:48 GMT 2018

OpenBSD/arm64 (foo.cryogenix.net) (console)

login:

Done.

$ uname -a
OpenBSD foo.cryogenix.net 6.4 GENERIC#511 arm64

$ sysinfo.pl
Hostname: foo - OS: OpenBSD 6.4/arm64 - CPU:  - Processes: 31 
Uptime: 2m - Users: 1 - Load Average: 1.19 - 
Memory Usage: 26.94MB/1990.47MB (1.35%) - 
Disk Usage: 0.62GB/9.73GB (6.42%)

cc -dumpmachine: aarch64-unknown-openbsd6.4

As always, thank you for reading and all feedback is welcome.