[SOLVED] Running on a VM? Specifically ESXi-ARM

[chrisspankroy]

Hi,

I have a RPi 4 that I have installed ESXi-ARM on. I am attempting to get an Arch Linux ARM virtual machine running on it. However, I can't get it to boot, I can't get it to go past the UEFI. Does anyone have any suggestions? The method I've been attempting is following the typical RPi 4 installation instructions, but using a virtual image file in place of the actual SD card. I would then convert the IMG file to a VMDK using $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'qemu-img convert'), uploaded to the RPi running ESXi, converted the VMDK to ESXi format using $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'vmkfstools -I orig.vmdk updated.vmdk'), and added the VMDK to a virtual machine. But, attempting to boot from the disk just throws me back into the UEFI. Any suggestions? Am I doing something wrong?

[graysky]

Not sure if this is related or not/never heard of ESXI-ARM nor have I tried virtualization of Arch ARM except for running lxc with it which works beautifully but: I do not know if some EFI options in the linux kernel are required for what you're wanting to do. Since RPis do not use EFI, we don't compile EFI support into the linux-raspberryp/4 kernels.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
% zgrep -i _efi /proc/config.gz
# CONFIG_EFI is not set
CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y
')

Have you tried using an image including the linux-aarch64 kernel? That does have it.

https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUIL ... #L477-L478
https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUIL ... #L601-L617

[chrisspankroy]

Just wanted to follow up on this in case anyone else wonders the same thing, I did end up successfully booting inside ESXi ARM.

The approach I was initially taking was not good, to say the least.

What I ended up doing was spinning up another VM (such as Ubuntu or whatever), and adding a second hard drive to that machine, which would later be used as the hard drive for the Arch Linux ARM VM. This initial VM would be used to configure that hard drive.

As mentioned above, use the ARMv8 generic aarch64 image, not the RPi 4 image. Then you just set up the boot and root partitions as normal. I then booted the image through the EFI shell, the only parameter I added was $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'root=/dev/sdaX rw'), where X is the number of your root partition. Then it booted just fine