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Project setup

Project setup

Xenith is a complex project that requires some setup to get started. This guide will walk you through the steps to get your development environment up and running. We use technologies like Vagrant and Ansible to make the setup process as easy as possible managing powerful tools like libvirt and KVM/QEMU.

Prerequisites

KVM

Note

KVM, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, is a hypervisor built into the Linux kernel. It is similar to Xen in purpose but much simpler to get running. Unlike native QEMU, which uses emulation, KVM is a special operating mode of QEMU that uses CPU extensions (HVM) for virtualization via a kernel module.

We use KVM as the backend VMM for QEMU which runs Xen, managed by Vagrant through libvirt. As KVM is built into the Linux kernel you only need to ensure that the necessary kernel modules are loaded and it supports nested virtualization (enables existing virtual machines to be run on third-party hypervisors).

Refer to the Arch Wiki for more information.
Refer to the official Ubuntu blog post KVM hypervisor: a beginners’ guide.

QEMU

Note

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. QEMU can use other hypervisors like Xen or KVM to use CPU extensions (HVM) for virtualization. When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performances by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU.

You can install QEMU on your system using the following commands:

sudo pacman -S qemu-desktop
sudo apt install qemu qemu-kvm bridge-utils -y

libvirt

Note

Libvirt is a collection of software that provides a convenient way to manage virtual machines and other virtualization functionality, such as storage and network interface management. These software pieces include a long term stable C API, a daemon (libvirtd), and a command line utility (virsh).

You can install libvirt on your system using the following commands:

sudo pacman -S libvirt
sudo apt install libvirt-daemon-system -y

The easiest way to ensure your user has access to libvirt daemon is to add member to libvirt user group. Members of the libvirt group have passwordless access to the RW daemon socket by default. You can do that by running the following commands:

sudo usermod -aG libvirt $USER
sudo usermod -aG libvirt-qemu $USER
sudo usermod -aG libvirt-kvm $USER

And then start the libvirtd service:

sudo systemctl start libvirtd

Tip

If you don’t want to start the libvirtd service after each reboot, you can enable it by running the following command:

sudo systemctl start libvirtd

virt-viewer

Note

Virt-viewer is a lightweight UI interface for interacting with the graphical display of virtualized guest OS. It is a minimalistic interface that allows you to interact with the guest OS without the need for a full-blown desktop environment.

You can install virt-viewer on your system using the following commands:

sudo pacman -S virt-viewer
sudo apt install virt-viewer -y

Vagrant

Note

Vagrant is a source-available software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments; e.g., for VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, Parallels, and AWS. It tries to simplify the software configuration management of virtualization in order to increase development productivity.

We use Vagrant to manage the virtual machine that enables us to boot Xen and its dom0 Debian VM. You can install Vagrant on your system using the following commands:

sudo pacman -S vagrant
# Install repository addition dependencies
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

# Import repository GPG keys
wget -O- <https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg> | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg

# Add the official Vagrant APT repository to your system
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] <https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com> $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list

# Once the repo is added, proceed to install vagrant
sudo apt update
sudo apt install vagrant -y

vagrant-libvirt plugin

Note

Vagrant-libvirt is a Vagrant plugin that adds a Libvirt provider to Vagrant, allowing Vagrant to control and provision machines via Libvirt toolkit. See vagrant-libvirt for more information.

As mentioned in the Arch Wiki, the libvirt plugin is not compatible with the ruby gems as currently shipped with the vagrant package in the Arch repos (which are up-to-date). This might cause an error such as Vagrant failed to properly resolve required dependencies.

A quick workaround is to disable the strict dependency enforcement by setting the VAGRANT_DISABLE_STRICT_DEPENDENCY_ENFORCEMENT environment variable to 1 before installing the plugin:

export VAGRANT_DISABLE_STRICT_DEPENDENCY_ENFORCEMENT=1

This manipulation can be done in your shell configuration file (e.g. ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.) to avoid running it every time you want to install and/or update a plugin.

Make sure you have the necessary dependencies installed:

sudo apt install ebtables libguestfs-tools ruby-fog-libvirt -y

Then install the plugin:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt

vagrant-reload plugin

Note

A plugin that allows you to reload a Vagrant plugin as a provisioning step. See vagrant-reload for more information.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload

Ansible

Note

Ansible is a suite of software tools that enables infrastructure as code. It is open-source and the suite includes software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment functionality.

We use Ansible to provision the virtual machines that we use for development. You can install Ansible on your system using the following commands:

sudo pacman -S ansible python-passlib
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ansible -y

Once you have installed Ansible, you will need to install the ansible.posix collection. This collection provides a set of Ansible modules that are used to interact with POSIX-like systems.

You can do this by running the following command:

ansible-galaxy collection install ansible.posix

Using Vagrant

Now that you have all the necessary tools installed, you can clone the Xenith repository and setup the development environment quickly using Vagrant.

vagrant up

This command will start the virtual machine and provision it using Ansible. Once the process is complete, you can either :

SSH into the dom0 virtual machine 

vagrant ssh

Access the graphical display of the dom0 virtual machine using our custom Vagrant command 

vagrant virt-viewer --dom0

Access the graphical display of the dom0 virtual machine directly with virt-viewer 

virt-manager --connect qemu:///system --show-domain-console xenith_xenith
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