Installing Tribblix in Bhyve on Tribblix

One of the big new features recently added to illumos is the Bhyve hypervisor. Rather that the shared-kernel application-level virtualization offered by zones, think of something like VirtualBox, KVM, or Qemu.

One of the things that I am using Bhyve for is to test the Tribblix ISO images and the installer. This allowed me to shrink the installer footprint slightly in recent releases (and showed that one of the tricks I tried wasn't going to work).

Using Bhyve requires a fairly modern system (my own is a little old, and has an Intel Core i7, and works fine). The instructions here also need you to be running current Tribblix, m24.1 or newer.

So, how do I install Tribblix in Bhyve on Tribblix? Most of the following needs to be done as root.

First, make sure that you have the software installed:

zap install-overlay bhyve

I'm doing this on my desktop, so I'm using VNC to connect.

zap install-overlay retro-desktop

You need the current ISO. Again, this has to be m24.1 or newer. Correct the path below to match wherever you've downloaded it to.

While you don't actually have to run bhyve in a zone, that's the standard and most convenient way. So, I use zap to create a zone:

zap create-zone -t bhyve -z bhyve1 \
-x 192.168.0.236  \
-I /var/tmp/tribblix-0m24.1.iso \
-V 8G

Let's run through these. The -t flag says to create a bhyve zone, -z gives it a name, -x gives it an (exclusive) IP address, -I tells it where the ISO image is, and -V tells it to create a ZFS volume of the given size. The other argument that may be of interest is -m, which allows you to set the amount of memory allocated; it defaults to 1024M which is fine for Tribblix.

Then you need to be able to connect to the instance. I'm going to use VNC to connect to the console. We use socat to wire up the bhyve socket in the zone to a network port in the global zone that we can connect to.

socat TCP-LISTEN:5905,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CONNECT:/export/zones/bhyve1/root/tmp/vm.vnc

You may need to modify the zone name in the path, and you can choose the TCP port (for VNC, it's offset by 5900, so the 5905 is :5 in VNC-speak).

 

 

 

Then, as yourself, you can start a VNC client

vncviewer :5

If that can't connect, then one possibility is that bhyve can't start because it doesn't have enough memory. One little trick to make sure there's enough headroom is to create a file in /tmp and then delete it immediately.

mkfile 1200m /tmp/1200m ; rm /tmp/1200m

You can then log in to the live environment. And do an install like so:

./live_install.sh -G c1t0d0

 

 

 

 

and the install will carry on

 

 

 

 

 

If you want to run this, you have to avoid booting off the CD. The way to do this is to remove the cdrom from the zone specification before you reboot the guest, like so:

zonecfg -z bhyve1 remove attr name=cdrom
zonecfg -z bhyve1 remove fs dir=/var/tmp/tribblix-0m24.1.iso special=/var/tmp/tribblix-0m24.1.iso
zoneadm -z bhyve1 reboot

Obviously, adjusted for the zone name and the ISO file name. I need to teach zap how to do this properly. And then start socat again (if you stopped it) and reconnect using VNC.

You may need to fiddle the networking in the installed guest. The exclusive-ip setting here will force the guest to use the given address. That's unlikely to work terribly well, as the chances of allocating the same address that DHCP would hand out are pretty remote. So to get it on the network you may have to fiddle in the guest by hand.

svcadm disable network/physical:nwam
echo "192.168.0.236/24" > /etc/hostname.vioif0
echo "192.168.0.1" > /etc/defaultrouter
svcadm enable network/physical:default

and populate /etc/resolv.conf with something relevant so that dns works

echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you're done, you can destroy the zone with

zap destroy-zone -z bhyve1

which will also destroy the ZFS volume it was using.

While the above refers to installing Tribblix inside Bhyve, the same general procedure ought to work to install other illumos distributions.