It was a matter of days and finally all pieces are done. Running 32-bit ARM virtual machines on 64-bit AArch64 hardware is possible and quite easy.
Requirements
- AArch64 hardware (I used APM Mustang as usual)
- ARM rootfs (fetched Fedora 22 image with “virt-builder” tool)
- ARM kernel and initramfs (I used Fedora 24 one)
- Virt Manager (can be done from shell too)
Configuration
Start “virt-manager” and add new machine:
Select rootfs, kernel, initramfs (dtb will be provided internally by qemu) and tell kernel where rootfs is:
Then set amount of memory and cores. I did 10GB of RAM and 8 cores. Save machine.
Let’s run
Open created machine and press Play button. It should boot:
I upgraded F22 to F24 to have latest development system.
Is it fast?
If I would just boot and write about it then there will be questions about performance. I did build of gcc 5.3.1-3 using mock (standard Fedora way). On arm32 Fedora builder it took 19 hours, on AArch64 builder 4.5h only. On my machine AArch64 build took 9.5 hour and in this vm it took 12.5h (slow hdd used). So builder with memory and some fast storage will boost arm32 builds a lot.
Numbers from “openssl speed” shows performance similar to host cpu:
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
md2 1787.41k 3677.19k 5039.02k 5555.88k 5728.94k
mdc2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
md4 24846.05k 81594.07k 226791.59k 418185.22k 554344.45k
md5 18881.79k 60907.46k 163927.55k 281694.58k 357168.47k
hmac(md5) 21345.25k 69033.83k 177675.52k 291996.33k 357250.39k
sha1 20776.17k 65099.46k 167091.03k 275240.62k 338582.71k
rmd160 15867.02k 42659.95k 88652.54k 123879.77k 140571.99k
rc4 167878.11k 186243.61k 191468.46k 192576.51k 193112.75k
des cbc 35418.48k 37327.19k 37803.69k 37954.56k 37991.77k
des ede3 13415.40k 13605.87k 13641.90k 13654.36k 13628.76k
idea cbc 36377.06k 38284.93k 38665.05k 38864.71k 39032.15k
seed cbc 42533.48k 43863.15k 44276.22k 44376.75k 44397.91k
rc2 cbc 29523.86k 30563.20k 30763.09k 30940.50k 30857.44k
rc5-32/12 cbc 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
blowfish cbc 60512.96k 66274.07k 67889.66k 68273.15k 68302.17k
cast cbc 56795.77k 61845.42k 63236.86k 63251.11k 63445.82k
aes-128 cbc 61479.48k 65319.32k 67327.49k 67773.78k 66590.04k
aes-192 cbc 53337.95k 55916.74k 56583.34k 56957.61k 57024.51k
aes-256 cbc 46888.06k 48538.97k 49300.82k 49725.44k 50402.65k
camellia-128 cbc 59413.00k 62610.45k 63400.53k 63593.13k 63660.03k
camellia-192 cbc 47212.40k 49549.89k 50590.21k 50843.99k 50012.16k
camellia-256 cbc 47581.19k 49388.89k 50519.13k 49991.68k 50978.82k
sha256 27232.09k 64660.84k 119572.57k 151862.27k 164874.92k
sha512 9376.71k 37571.93k 54401.88k 74966.36k 84322.99k
whirlpool 3358.92k 6907.67k 11214.42k 13301.08k 14065.66k
aes-128 ige 60127.48k 65397.14k 67277.65k 67428.35k 67584.00k
aes-192 ige 52340.73k 56249.81k 57313.54k 57559.38k 57191.08k
aes-256 ige 46090.63k 48848.96k 49684.82k 49861.32k 49892.01k
ghash 150893.11k 171448.55k 177457.92k 179003.39k 179595.95k
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.000322s 0.000026s 3101.3 39214.9
rsa 1024 bits 0.001446s 0.000073s 691.7 13714.6
rsa 2048 bits 0.008511s 0.000251s 117.5 3987.5
rsa 4096 bits 0.058092s 0.000945s 17.2 1058.4
sign verify sign/s verify/s
dsa 512 bits 0.000272s 0.000297s 3680.6 3363.6
dsa 1024 bits 0.000739s 0.000897s 1353.1 1115.2
dsa 2048 bits 0.002762s 0.002903s 362.1 344.5
sign verify sign/s verify/s
256 bit ecdsa (nistp256) 0.0005s 0.0019s 1977.8 538.3
384 bit ecdsa (nistp384) 0.0015s 0.0057s 663.0 174.6
521 bit ecdsa (nistp521) 0.0035s 0.0136s 286.8 73.4
op op/s
256 bit ecdh (nistp256) 0.0016s 616.0
384 bit ecdh (nistp384) 0.0049s 204.8
521 bit ecdh (nistp521) 0.0115s 87.2