Running Palacios/Kitten

Kitten and Palacios are capable of running under QEMU, which makes debugging much simpler. QEMU is a user-level Linux or Windows program that emulates a PC machine.

The basic form of the command to start the QEMU emulator is:

/usr/local/qemu/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -smp 1 -m 1024 \
        -serial file:./serial.out \
        -cdrom ./arch/x86_64/boot/image.iso  \
        < /dev/null

The command starts up a single processor emulated machine, with 1GB of RAM and a CD-ROM drive loaded with the Kitten ISO image. All output to the serial port is written directly to a file called serial.out. This command can be copied into a shell script for easy access.

We can also run Palacios/Kitten on physical hardware. The slow way is to burn the Kitten ISO image onto a CD ROM and then boot the test machine with it. The much faster way is to set the test machine up to use the PXE network boot system (most modern BIOSes support this), and boot your Kitten image over the network. The debugging output will then appear on the actual serial port of the physical machine. The separate document Booting Palacios/Kitten Over the Network Using PXE explains how to set up PXE boot and serial. For the Northwestern environment, please talk to Jack, Peter, Lei, or Yuan if you need to be able to do this. Northwestern has a range of AMD and Intel boxes for testing, as do UNM and Sandia. A different form of network boot is used for Red Storm.