Nova demo with GUI

[Alexander Boettcher]

Hello,

On 20.04.2017 15:43, Chris Rothrock wrote:
> In the release notes of Genode version 14.02 there is a screenshot of a GUI
> environment that has two VirtualBox windows, one running TinyCore, one
> running Windows 7 (https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/14.02).

actual no - not two VirtualBox instances. As written in the text and
below the picture, it is running:

- Tinycore managed by the Seoul VMM
- and Windows 7 managed by the VirtualBox-4 VMM

on top of the micro-hypervisor NOVA.

> How do I reproduce this example?  

We have no ready-to-use run script for this scenario anymore, I fear.
One would have to create such a run script again (and maintain it ...).

> When I run the make run/virtualbox demo
> there is no GUI (until I get into one guest OS GUI, TinyCore), there is
> only a text-based boot environment then the hand-off to VirtualBox in that
> text environment.

The virtualbox.run script mainly exists to showcase the simplest
possible VM scenario (without [mostly] any fancy stuff - even no GUI).
We use it mainly for very tiny VMs like Tinycore ISO or Genode ISOs.

> I need to be able to successfully boot up into that GUI
> environment and demonstrate two distinct VM's are running.  Any assistance
> in this effort would be greatly appreciated.

In repos/port/run/ you may find several flavors of vbox*.run scripts,
which are executed every night on our test machines.

One specific scenario is called vbox*_multiple.run, which starts on our
test machine 6 Win7 VMs in parallel and has also some really simple GUI
setup (nitpicker - so no window manager, no decorations etc.).
However the run script is non-trivial, it expects the machine well
prepared (ahci hard disk, right partition scheme, win7 vdi names,
overlay vdi names, correct uuid of the vdis and so on and so on).

There are of course several seoul*.run scripts in reports/port/run to
start VMs via the Seoul VMM - seoul-fancy.run also contains some simple
GUI and multiple VM setup.

And as last option I have the virtualbox.run script [0] bit extended to
start 2 VBox VMMs using the same ISO image for the VMs with
nitpicker/nit_fb. I did not tested it throughly, but it comes up in Qemu
at least for me. Maybe it can serve as starting point. (set the use_gui
variable to 1 to get two VMs).

Cheers,

Alex.

[0]
https://github.com/alex-ab/genode/commit/955d9ea638437e974ebd8e058f6237b3add2f3c7
-- 
Alexander Boettcher
Genode Labs

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