Building bhyve Images using makefs and mkimg

Posted: October 29, 2014 at 8:57 PM

Recently Neel Natu committed work to enable bhyve to run on AMD processors. My main development machine is an AMD A10-5700, so the commit enables me to use bhyve for testing.

EDIT: Anish Gupta did the work that Neel Natu committed. Thanks Anish!

I had previously built images using makefs and mkimg for a CF card for use in another machine, so being able to build images to use with bhyve makes sense.

First, you need to make sure that you have a complete source check out along with a completed buildworld and buildkernel. Then follow these steps:

  1. Install world and distribution into a temporary directory using the NO_ROOT option: 
    
    make installworld DESTDIR=<tmpdir> -DDB_FROM_SRC -DNO_ROOT
    make distribution DESTDIR=<tmpdir> -DDB_FROM_SRC -DNO_ROOT
    This preps everything with the defaults as necessary.
  2. Install a kernel either into a different directory (I do this) or into the same directory above: 
    
    make installkernel DESTDIR=<tmpkerndir> -DNO_ROOT KERNCONF=<conf>
  3. Make a directory with your custom configuration files. The basics are /etc/rc.conf and /etc/fstab and you might want /firstboot on there too. You will also need a METALOG file which contains the permissions for the files. This is just a standard mtree file, so you could use mtree to generate this instead of creating it by hand. The file contents are below.
  4. Build the ufs image using the makeroot.sh script in the src tree at tools/tools/makeroot/makeroot.sh: 
    
    /usr/src/tools/tools/makeroot/makeroot.sh  -e <custdir>/METALOG -e <tmpkerndir>/METALOG -p <tmpdir>/etc/master.passwd -s 2g ufs.img root
  5. Build the disc image: 
    
    mkimg -s gpt -b <tmpdir>/boot/pmbr -p freebsd-boot:=<tmpdir>/boot/gptboot -p freebsd-swap::1G -p freebsd-ufs:=ufs.img -o disc.img
  6. Run the image: 
    
    sh /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.sh -d disc.img vm0

There you have it. Besides running the image, all the other steps can be done as a normal user w/o root access.

EDIT: You also might want to include an /entropy file (populated with 4k from /dev/random) in your custom directory so that the image has a good seed for entropy at first boot for things such as sshd key generation.

File contents:

  • /etc/fstab: 

    
  /dev/vtbd0p3    /               ufs     rw              1 1

  • Custom METALOG: 

    
  #mtree 2.0
  ./etc/rc.conf type=file uname=root gname=wheel mode=0644
  ./etc/fstab type=file uname=root gname=wheel mode=0644
  ./firstboot type=file uname=root gname=wheel mode=0644

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