Using PiMox on other SBCs/Server?

[stevefan1999-personal]

I was wondering if I can use this on a Rock64 I own, or be deployed on a ThunderX2 so this could be a very good alternative for ESXi

[MakiseKurisu]

Yes. I'm using Pimox on Rock Pi 4B+ and (after a long break) I just managed to get OpenWrt (actually muVirt) and VLAN running.

You will need pimox/qemu-server#1 to run KVM on big.LITTLE ARM processors though.

Here are steps I did to install the base system and Pimox from scratch. Need some polish and this is EBBR boot only though.

[benep]

I'm also using Pimox on a Rock Pi 4B for some weeks. I used Armbian as base and the manual installation of Pimox. But I only got LXC containers running (Adguard, Nginx PM, Speedtest). VMs did never start.

@MakiseKurisu can you point what to do on a running system to get VMs run on RockPi 4B?

[MakiseKurisu]

I'm also using Pimox on a Rock Pi 4B for some weeks. I used Armbian as base and the manual installation of Pimox. But I only got LXC containers running (Adguard, Nginx PM, Speedtest). VMs did never start.

@MakiseKurisu can you point what to do on a running system to get VMs run on RockPi 4B?

You need to apply the patch like I said, set VM threads to be <=4, then specify cpu_taskset to have the same amount of cores in your vm.conf. They have to come from the same cluster, so 1-4 and 5-6 are legal but you cannot specify 4-5 since they are from different cluster.

Then you need to have machine type default, BIOS OVMF, virtio-scsi instead of single for storage controller, change ide cdrom to scsi, and virtgpu for graphic. You should at least see BIOS screen and get waiting on PXE boot with this config. You can then add either EFI enabled disk image (normal single board computer image like Armbian won't work), or use Debian's ARM64 iso to install a system.

[benep]

So I added the changes from your pr to my /usr/share/perl5/PVE/QemuServer.pm

Also I added the cpu_taskset info to my /etc/pve/qemu-server/106.conf

cores: 4
cpu: host
cpu_taskset: 0-3

But without luck:

kvm: kvm_init_vcpu: kvm_arch_init_vcpu failed (0): Invalid argument
TASK ERROR: start failed: QEMU exited with code 1

I used a debain netinst arm64 iso which is running as vm on my raspberry with pimox.

[Kisty]

How would one go about building the kernel for another SBC, like an Odroid N2+, so to run Pimox on any Arm64 arch? I have put on Debian 11 bullseye arm64 and have tried to look for kernel headers for 5.10.0-83 (current Pimox kernel version) but can only find -84 and -90 and running the script doesn't install. Having issues with ceph-dkms amongst others.

[jonstump]

@MakiseKurisu When installing these on non-pi boards, did you have to split the sd card at all so that your additional nodes had space for both a local and local-lvm manually or did the script do it for you? I ask because yesterday on my CM4 it made my entire emmc module local and gave it no local-lvm storage

[Kisty]

Could you document or outline how you build the source so that I can run it on my ODroid N2?