vNUMA

This is a snapshot of the vnuma hypervisor and afterburner for IA64 as of December 2008. Some files contain licences; any that do not are covered by this licence:

	 Copyright  (c) Matthew Chapman, NICTA and UNSW, 2010.

  Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
  are met:
  1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
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  2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
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     documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 
  3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
     must display the following acknowledgement:
  	This product includes software developed by Matthew Chapman
	 and the University of New South Wales. 
  4. The name Matthew Chapman or the name University of New South
     Wales may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from
     this software without specific prior written permission.

  THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED `AS IS' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
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The code builds more-or-less cleanly with gcc-4.0; it is released as example code only — there is no guarantee it works reliably (or at all). The hypervisor is fairly specific to HP zx6000 machines in its drivers: it assumes a LSI MPT '909 fibrechannel disk driver. The guest patches are for Linux 2.6.18.

To build the hypervisor just type make in the top-level directory.

To build a linux guest, apply the patch patches/vnuma-afterburn.diff and gcc4.0.patch to a clean checkout of Linux (last tested on 2.6.18), copy patches/CONFIG to .config in the kernel build tree, and build with:

  make ARCH=ia64 CROSS_COMPILE=ia64-linux- AFTERBURNER=$THIS_DIRECTORY/afterburner vmlinux

The easiest way to run the system is to use tftp booting. To run the hypervisor plus guest(s) set up elilo.conf as

  image=/tftpboot/vnuma
        label=vnuma
        initrd=/tftpboot/vmlinux
        root=/dev/nfs
        read-only
        append="nomca maxcpus=8 simscsi=sd simeth=eth0 nfsroot=/srv/nfsroot ip=192.168.100.10:192.168.100.4:192.168.100.4:255.255.255.0:nodename"

for the master node, where vnuma is the hypervisor built above, and vmlinux is the patched afterburnt linux kernel.

The append= line is whatever's necessary for NFS root for your system. In this case it says that the node's IP address is 192.168.100.10, the NFS server is on 192.168.120.4, the default route is via 192.168.100.4, and the netmask is 255.255.255.0. Also this host's name is nodename.

On slave nodes, elilo.conf is:

image=/tftpboot/vnuma
        label=vnuma

Vnuma initialises itself by broadcasting to find other nodes. so you need to boot all nodes within a few seconds of each other. Boot the slaves first, then the master.