Creating and running Mezzano in a dual boot system takes three steps:
-
Create the dual boot system
-
Create a Mezzano image
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Put the Mezzano image on the partition in the dual boot system
For example, I installed Fedora 28, using custom disk partitioning:
/ 20 GB (my development system is using about 14GB of 50GB)
/home 50 GB (my Mezzano development directory is using 3.5GB)
/boot 2 GB (increased from 1GB just because)
/swap 2GB (default value as system only has 2GB RAM)
/mezzano 10 GB (created as standard partition and ext4)
/tag-fs 50 GB (created as standard partition and ext4 - but will change partition type later)
I created the /tag-fs partition because one of the projects I want to work on is a Mezzano based file system. This partition is not required otherwise required.
After installing and configuring Fedora, I noted which partitions are /mezzano and /tag-fs by looking in /etc/fstab (in my case /mezzano was mounted on /dev/sda3 and /tag-fs was mounted on /dev/sda5). Then I removed the /mezzano and /tag-fs lines from /etc/fstab.
I un-mounted /mezzano and /tag-fs - they aren't going to be ext4 file systems.
Using fdisk, I changed the partition type for /tag-fs to 7f (unkown) as there is no tag-fs specific partition type at this time. The partition type for /mezzano was left as 83 (Linux) which matches the partition type in the other images generated for Mezzano.
The next step in creating a dual boot system is to update the /boot directory by copying kboot.bin into /boot and creating kboot.cfg in /boot.
For kboot.cfg I'm using the following contents:
set "timeout" 5
entry "Mezzano - hardware detection with video console" {
set "video_mode" "lfb:1440x900"
mezzano "hd0,2" "video-console"
}
entry "Mezzano - hardware detection" {
set "video_mode" "lfb:1440x900"
mezzano "hd0,2"
}
entry "Mezzano - freestanding with video console" {
set "video_mode" "lfb:1440x900"
mezzano "hd0,2" "freestanding" "no-detect" "video-console"
}
entry "Mezzano - freestanding" {
set "video_mode" "lfb:1440x900"
mezzano "hd0,2" "freestanding" "no-detect"
}
The hd0,2 is because the /mezzano partition is /dev/sda3 and kboot uses partition numbers starting with 0 where fdisk uses partition numbers starting with 1.
The 1440x900 is the resolution of my laptop.
"video-console" means that console messages are shown on the display. They are not shown in a window, they are drawn directly on the background window. This can be annoying, but useful if you are experience crashs or panics.
"freestanding" means that Mezzano runs as is in memory, no paging and no snapshots. This mode is suitable for read only media (eg CDROMs and DVDs). It also requires less working drivers, so if you have difficulting booting without "freestanding", it may be worth trying with it.
"no-detect" disables most hardware detection. Again, this option maybe useful when having trouble booting.
The first entry in the table is the default entry which is automatically selected after "timeout" seconds. So, it's nice if the first entry is the one you expect to use the most.
I created a Mezzano boot menu item by adding the following lines to /etc/grub.d/40_custom:
menuentry 'Mezzano' {
multiboot /kboot.bin
module /kboot.cfg kboot.cfg
}
After modifying /etc/grub.d/40_custom, the next step is to update /boot/grub/grub2/grub.cfg. I suggest making a copy of this file first so that if something goes wrong you can restore it by booting the rescue disk and moving the original back.
To update /boot/grub/grub2/grub.cfg you need to run this command:
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub2/grub.cfg
This merges all of the individual grub configuration files into the single configuration file that grub actually uses.
Boot Mezzano on a virtual machine and configure as desired (i.e., load any apps or libraries), then evaluate:
(mezzano.supervisor:snapshot)
in a lisp listener which saves the current state of Mezzano on the virutal disk. Then, in the MBuild directory, run the shell command:
qemu-img convert -O raw mezzano.vmdk Mezzano/tools/kboot/image.raw
which converts the vmdk file to a raw disk image. This image can be used directly in step 3 below. However, in my configuration, image.raw is large 4GB which makes copying it to my dual boot machine slow. So instead, in MBuild/Mezzano/tools/kboot I run the shell command:
./build-native-image
which creates a live-cd version of the Mezzano image in
cdrom.iso. cdrom.iso is much smaller as build-native-image
compresses the Mezzano significantly. build-native-image requires
that the kboot tool set be installed.
Get the Mezzano image into the Fedora file system. Either create it there in step 2 or copy it from where ever it was created.
If you are using cdrom.iso, then copy the image onto the partition using:
sudo dd if=cdrom.iso of=<partition> bs=2048 skip=1635
In my case, I use of=/dev/sda3 because the /mazzano partition is
/dev/sda3. The reason I use bs=2048 and skip=1635 is that we need to
skip over the first two partitions in cdrom.iso. The output of fdisk -l cdrom.iso is:
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
cdrom.iso1 4488 6535 2048 1M 83 Linux
cdrom.iso2 * 2440 4487 2048 1M 83 Linux
cdrom.iso3 6540 542155 535616 261.5M 83 Linux
This means that the Mezzano image starts at byte offset 6540*512. Since skip=1635 causes dd to skip over the first 1635 blocks (of size 2048) of the input file and 1635*2048 = 6540*512, dd starts copying at the beginning of the Mezzano image.
If you are using image.raw, then copy the image onto the partition using:
sudo dd if=image.raw of=<partition> bs=8192 skip=512
This works because the output of fdisk -l image.raw is:
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
image.raw1 2048 4095 2048 1M 83 Linux
image.raw2 * 4096 6143 2048 1M 83 Linux
image.raw3 8192 8388607 8380416 4G 83 Linux
Similar to the case above, the Mezzano image starts at byte offset 8192*512 and dd skips over the first 512 blocks (of size 8192).
Now when you reboot, one of the grub boot menu items will be "Mezzano" and if you select that item, the kboot menu will appear and you can select one of the versions of Mezzano boot.
If booting fails and the last message on the console is "Multiple CPUS detected. SMP support is currently experimental and unreliable." Then it's likely that you are running on system with multiple processors (including multithread cores) with SMP enabled in both HW and Mezzano and that is failing.
This can be fixed by either turning off SMP in the BIOS (which affects all of the OSes) or by disabling it in Mezzano.
To disable it in Mezzano, you can comment out the call to boot-secondary-cpus in supervisor/entry.lisp (approx. line 172).
If you suspect a disk driver issue the problem maybe the disk controller's mode of operation. In my case, the system booted with "freestanding" and "no-detect". But, I noticed that no disk drives were configured ((mezzano.supervisor:all-disks) returned NIL).
Attempting to boot without "freestanding" and "no-detect" hung. The disk controller was originally configured in the BIOS as IRRT (intel rapid restore technology) and the other options were: ATA mode or AHCI mode. By trial and error I determined that AHCI mode worked. All three modes worked for my Linux partition.
ATA mode may work if it operates in ISA compatitiblity mode as the Mezzano ATA driver only supports ISA compatible devices.
USB keyboards and mice are unreliable because there's no USB stack. The BIOS emulates a PS/2 device and a lot of them tend to be buggy. Try booting with the keyboard or mouse attached, if that doesn't work try attaching them after booting.
In my case, the external mouse interferred with the trackpad and internal mouse. With the external mouse plugged in, the pointer would only move up and down near the left edge of the display, and would only move a very short way left and right.
Mezzano only has drivers for virtio-net and rtl8168 NICs.
Last modified 17 June 2018.