Implement a subset of the multiboot specification in order to boot Xen
and a FreeBSD Dom0 from the FreeBSD bootloader. This multiboot
implementation is tailored to boot Xen and FreeBSD Dom0, and it will
most surely fail to boot any other multiboot compilant kernel.
In order to detect and boot the Xen microkernel, two new file formats
are added to the bootloader, multiboot and multiboot_obj. Multiboot
support must be tested before regular ELF support, since Xen is a
multiboot kernel that also uses ELF. After a multiboot kernel is
detected, all the other loaded kernels/modules are parsed by the
multiboot_obj format.
The layout of the loaded objects in memory is the following; first the
Xen kernel is loaded as a 32bit ELF into memory (Xen will switch to
long mode by itself), after that the FreeBSD kernel is loaded as a RAW
file (Xen will parse and load it using it's internal ELF loader), and
finally the metadata and the modules are loaded using the native
FreeBSD way. After everything is loaded we jump into Xen's entry point
using a small trampoline. The order of the multiboot modules passed to
Xen is the following, the first module is the RAW FreeBSD kernel, and
the second module is the metadata and the FreeBSD modules.
Since Xen will relocate the memory position of the second
multiboot module (the one that contains the metadata and native
FreeBSD modules), we need to stash the original modulep address inside
of the metadata itself in order to recalculate its position once
booted. This also means the metadata must come before the loaded
modules, so after loading the FreeBSD kernel a portion of memory is
reserved in order to place the metadata before booting.
In order to tell the loader to boot Xen and then the FreeBSD kernel the
following has to be added to the /boot/loader.conf file:
xen_cmdline="dom0_mem=1024M dom0_max_vcpus=2 dom0pvh=1 console=com1,vga"
xen_kernel="/boot/xen"
The first argument contains the command line that will be passed to the Xen
kernel, while the second argument is the path to the Xen kernel itself. This
can also be done manually from the loader command line, by for example
typing the following set of commands:
OK unload
OK load /boot/xen dom0_mem=1024M dom0_max_vcpus=2 dom0pvh=1 console=com1,vga
OK load kernel
OK load zfs
OK load if_tap
OK load ...
OK boot
Sponsored by: Citrix Systems R&D
Reviewed by: jhb
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D517
For the Forth bits:
Submitted by: Julien Grall <julien.grall AT citrix.com>
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