bhyve: Detecting that a guest kernel has booted

[Shawn Webb]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 11:09:07AM -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 10:58:55AM -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> > > -- Start of PGP signed section.
> > > > On 2019-03-11T13:08:53 -0400
> > > > Shawn Webb <shawn.webb at hardenedbsd.org> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > If your guest OS supports it, you could probably write two scripts that
> > > > > uses virtio_console(4), one for the guest to tell the host "HELLO" and
> > > > > one for the host to say "NICE TO SEE YOU!" once the guest's "HELLO" is
> > > > > received.
> > > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > They're a mix of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Debian guests. So I'm guessing
> > > > one out of three of those supports it...
> > > > 
> > > > I suppose my other option would be to add (another) NFS mount in each
> > > > guest, and have them touch a file early in the init script (and
> > > > possibly touch a different file early in the shutdown script).
> > > 
> > > Well ICMP is in the kernel, and should be working as soon as the
> > > interface is up, long before you could do anything with NFS,
> > > so rather than the complexity above a simple ping would suffice.
> > 
> > Just a note: Windows systems disable inbound ICMP by default, but
> > inbound ICMP support can be enabled post-installation.
> > 
> > > There is also the phase of vmm(8) startup that when you are
> > > running bhyveload vs bhyve and iirc grubload vs bhyve, that
> > > can be detected.  vmbhyve does so and says you are in state
> > > looader when you do a vm list.
> > 
> > I would suggest using bhyve with UEFI. I wish a death upon bhyveload
> > and grub2-bhyve.
> 
> I have no love for them either, but until we get our UEFI updated
> it is a rather sad state of affairs.  If we could a) get on a modern
> version of ed2k, and b) bet the CSM fixed so that we could actually
> boot bios mode stuff with it and c) maybe make a port of seabios
> that could be used then we would be kicking some seriuos stuff!

If I'm able to run an internship this year like I did last year, I
might have my interns update our UEFI firmware to the latest release
and/or make a BSDL seabios port.

My employer was recently acquired, so I'm likely not going to run an
internship this year.

Thanks,

-- 
Shawn Webb
Cofounder and Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

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