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Helios Image Creation

This directory contains a rough process for creating a Helios VM image for development purposes that will run well under KVM/QEMU on a Linux workstation, or some other hypervisor host.

If you're interested in running a Helios image, a pre-built image may be obtained using the download.sh script (refer here for usage instructions).

Prerequisites

Privilege Elevation

Your user account needs to be able to run the image-builder tool with elevated privileges (e.g., as the root user) in order to perform certain tasks. To achieve this, we use pfexec(1) from within the programs that drive the image build. Your user account should be configured to allow elevation; e.g., by adding the Primary Administrator profile:

# profiles frank
Basic Solaris User
All
# usermod -P 'Primary Administrator' frank

$ id
uid=1000(frank) gid=10(staff)
$ pfexec id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)

NOTE: This means your user can now do anything as root merely by prefixing it with pfexec. Configuring the system for a minimal set of required elevations instead of blanket super-user access is currently an exercise for the reader; see rbac(7), privileges(7), auths(1), profiles(1), roles(1), pfexec(1), auth_attr(5), exec_attr(5), prof_attr(5), user_attr(5), etc.

ZFS Dataset

The image construction process requires the use of a ZFS dataset, and the ability to create child datasets, and create and roll back to snapshots underneath that dataset. The top-level dataset is, by default, rpool/images/$LOGNAME. This does not exist by default, so you must create it:

$ pfexec zfs create -p rpool/images/$LOGNAME

The default setting is provided by etc/defaults.sh and you can override it by creating an appropriate etc/config.sh; e.g.,

$ echo 'DATASET=myotherpool/images' > etc/config.sh

If you forget to create the dataset, there will be an error message about the fact that it does not yet exist when you try to build an image.

Create an Image

This process must be run on an illumos system.

#
# Create the working ZFS dataset and download and build the required tools:
#
gmake setup

#
# Create a seed tar file containing the base Helios OS files:
#
./strap.sh

#
# Customise and create a final bootable image file for QEMU/KVM:
#
MACHINE=qemu ./image.sh

Note that the full-size image which includes all the development tools is quite large, and thus is not built by default. It can be constructed by passing VARIANT in the environment; e.g.,

gmake setup
VARIANT=full ./strap.sh
VARIANT=full MACHINE=qemu ./image.sh

Create a VM from the image

The aforementioned commands should create an output image:

# Check that the image was created.
ls -lh /rpool/$LOGNAME/images/output/helios-qemu-ttya-$VARIANT.raw

This image may be copied out of the illumos system (via a command like scp) and used in the VM config as INPUT_IMAGE. For more detail, refer to the instructions for VM creation.