How to enable kvm/virtualisation on orange pi 3 lts?

[Linux_Tester]

How to enable kvm/virtualisation on orange pi 3 lts? I want run windows for arm on qemu with kvm, but in the kernel there is no kvm module . How i can add this module to kernel? I know that the allwinner h6 has support for virtualisation.

Edited April 1, 2023 by Linux_Tester

[Werner]

You can use the build framework to create a custom kernel package for your board:https://github.com/armbian/build

[Linux_Tester]

@Werner

I can use this build framework for official orange pi distro(ubuntu)?

[Werner]

Short answer: No. It is for building Armbian with your favorite userspace (Debian or Ubuntu) on top.

 

Not so short answer: Yesno. About a year ago Orangepi forked the Armbian build framework to produce their own "official" images so... 😄

[dragonflylee]

you can try my fork of official image builder

 

https://github.com/dragonflylee/orangepi/releases/download/next/Orangepi3-lts_3.1.0_debian_bookworm_server_linux5.16.17.img.gz

[Igor]

3 hours ago, dragonflylee said:

you can try my fork of official image builder

 

Official image builder is old Armbian fork that is not maintained by anyone, so its at least security hazardous to run those low quality quickly made official builds. Anyway they are contributing nothing but build configs.

 

You would help a lot more people, regularly, if you add config changes (what you are adding, not what you are striping out) to the Armbian build framework, which is applying fixes daily:

- for build configuration

- hardware support

https://docs.armbian.com/Release_Changelog/

 

That you will not find in official software support.

[ag123]

this topic is interesting and I delved a little into this rabbit hole for a little.

 

the conventional KVM started in Intel's  X86 and subquently AMD's X86_64 architecture

https://linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page

Quote

Kernel Virtual Machine

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko.

Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc.

 

then along the way came ARM virtualization extensions

https://genode.org/documentation/articles/arm_virtualization

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102142/0100/Virtualization-host-extensions

but that technically, this is running ARM instructions in a hardware enabled virtualization container.

Hence, if one is thinking about emulating X86 codes that may be another universe on its own and another layer of complexity.

So for that matter we consider the idea of running different ARM OS in ARM hardware virtualizations.

 

So here are some links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine#cite_note-7

https://systems.cs.columbia.edu/projects/kvm-arm/

https://web.archive.org/web/20130310052146/http://columbia.github.com/linux-kvm-arm/

https://github.com/columbia/linux-kvm-arm

well that is KVM

 

but have you also taken a look at Xen?

https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/

^ I never fully understand the difference between Xen vs KVM until I reviewed the slides

https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Software_Overview

https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Software_Overview#Host_and_Guest_Install

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Xen

 

the details are quite complicated but  hopefully it provide options, and I'm uncertain how well would that Xen hypervisor run on Allwinner H6.