Beginner questions: Seoul, Rust, DDE, and system composition

[Alexander Boettcher]

Hello,

On 14.09.23 22:59, Zachary Zollers wrote:

> [1] Is Seoul still viable for virtualization on Genode? If so, where can I find the documentation for writing a VM configuration? I am partial to Seoul over VirtualBox due to its smaller codebase. I checked the genode-world repository and the original (outdated) source repository, but was unable to find anything.

it depends on how you define "viable" and whom you ask ;). I use Seoul on a daily basis, see [0] for ready-to-use packets, to operate a up-to-date Firefox and Thunderbird VM on Sculpt 23.04 on Intel notebooks and AMD desktop machines, so for me personally it is very viable. Thanks to the various virtio models support [1] it is comfortable nowadays to use it interactively. If you define "viable" as "same features and functionality" like the VBox VMM, then it is not at the same level. Some convenience guest integration features are missing, like shared folder or clipboard support, but nothing you can solve differently via a network connection. The 64bit VM support is on the way and looks promising. You can already test drive a 64bit Firefox VM version available in my alex-ab Sculpt 23.04 index. Compared to VBox, however, crafting a runnable VM is not ever straight forward. I personally succeeded in setting up and running Tinycore based VMs and installing and running a Debian VM from scratch.

If you look into the seoul.port [2] file in genode-world, you will find the links to the current used Seoul sources. [3] contains the package description I used to publish the ready-to-use Firefox & Thunderbird VM. [4] contains the used Seoul VMM configurations. There is no much high-level documentation about how to configure the Seoul VMM. In principle the xml tags used in [3], corresponds to the models in the sourcecode [6]. Each model contains a short description in the sources about the model and the possible parameters. If one wants to develop and/or play around with the Seoul VMM, the run scripts in [5] are handy. In principle they ease the generation of the Seoul VMM config and the final result look like in [4].

Cheers,

Alex.


[0] https://genodians.org/alex-ab/2023-05-09-seoul-23-04
[1] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/22.11#Seoul_VMM
[2] https://github.com/genodelabs/genode-world/blob/master/ports/seoul.port
[3] https://github.com/alex-ab/genode-world/commits/seoul_23_04_pkg
[4] https://github.com/alex-ab/genode-world/commit/fb0d60b9c4aa538308f48d92b0f08837d71b625d
[5] https://github.com/alex-ab/genode-world/tree/master/run/seoul*
[6] https://github.com/alex-ab/seoul/tree/master/model/*
-- 
Alexander Boettcher
Genode Labs

https://www.genodians.org - https://www.genode.org