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Inter-VM Shared Memory (ivshmem) Ethernet

Overview

This application demonstrates how to use IVSHMEM Ethernet to communicate with another “cell” in the Jailhouse hypervisor. Currently only the qemu_cortex_a53 board is supported.

Building Jailhouse Linux for QEMU

Clone Jailhouse yocto project. At the time of writing, the “next” branch has some fixes that are not yet on the “master” branch:

git clone https://github.com/siemens/jailhouse-images.git
cd jailhouse-images
git checkout origin/next

Open the menu, select “QEMU ARM64 virtual target” then “Save & Build” (this will take a while):

./kas-container menu

Edit “start-qemu.sh”:

change -cpu cortex-a57 -> -cpu cortex-a53 under the arm64|aarch64 case
Enable SSH access by appending ,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 to -netdev user,id=net in the QEMU process arguments (2222 can be replaced with any unused port)

Start QEMU:

./start-qemu.sh arm64

This should boot Linux and drop into a shell.

Build the Zephyr sample

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b qemu_cortex_a53 samples/drivers/ethernet/eth_ivshmem

Running the sample

Copy the generated zephyr.bin to the Jailhouse Linux root cell:

scp -P 2222 path/to/zephyr.bin root@localhost:/root

Jailhouse has a prebuilt Zephyr cell configuration that works for this sample “qemu-arm64-zephyr-demo”.

Back in Jailhouse Linux shell, create the Zephyr cell:

jailhouse enable /etc/jailhouse/qemu-arm64.cell
jailhouse console
jailhouse cell create /etc/jailhouse/qemu-arm64-zephyr-demo.cell

You may see a quirk here where the Linux shell stops taking input… If you get this, open a second shell via SSH:

ssh -p 2222 root@localhost

Load and start the Zephyr cell:

jailhouse cell load qemu-arm64-zephyr-demo zephyr.bin --address 0x70000000
jailhouse cell start qemu-arm64-zephyr-demo

Now you can run Zephyr and Linux shell commands to communicate between the cells.

Ping Linux from Zephyr

*** Booting Zephyr OS build v3.3.0-475-g45b9e84c6013 ***
uart:~$ net ping 192.168.19.1
PING 192.168.19.1
28 bytes from 192.168.19.1 to 192.168.19.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=5.06 ms
28 bytes from 192.168.19.1 to 192.168.19.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=7.99 ms
28 bytes from 192.168.19.1 to 192.168.19.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1.77 ms

Ping Zephyr from Linux

root@demo:~# ping -c 3 192.168.19.2
PING 192.168.19.2 (192.168.19.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.19.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.646 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.19.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.45 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.19.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1.28 ms

--- 192.168.19.2 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.646/1.124/1.450/0.345 ms

Run zperf / iPerf

zperf: Network Traffic Generator / iPerf can be used to perform network throughput measurements.

In Zephyr:

# Start zperf TCP server
zperf tcp download 5001

In Linux:

# Install iPerf 2.0.5
apt install wget
wget https://iperf.fr/download/ubuntu/iperf_2.0.5+dfsg1-2_arm64.deb
apt install ./iperf_2.0.5+dfsg1-2_arm64.deb
rm iperf_2.0.5+dfsg1-2_arm64.deb

# Connect iPerf TCP client
iperf -l 1K -V -c 192.168.19.2 -p 5001

Zephyr output:

TCP server started on port 5001
New TCP session started.
TCP session ended
 Duration:              10.01 s
 rate:                  57.72 Mbps

Linux output:

------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.19.2, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.19.1 port 58430 connected with 192.168.19.2 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  72.2 MBytes  60.6 Mbits/sec