Riku Voipio of Linaro has announced the release of some new tools that validate the VM to the Linux cross-distro list.
Some time ago we drafted a specification[1] for AArch64 virtual machines. Now we are launching verification tools that let everyone verify that the whole stack (host hypervisor, guest firmware and guest OS image) implements the spec 2[]. For some extra background see the blog post on vmspec [3]. From the cross-distro point of view, we are interested in finding out if
– QEMU shipped is new enough (2.6+)
– a compatible EFI for arm64 guests is available
– a vmspec compatible cloud guest image is available
If the image comes with cloud-init, vmspec-boot can be used directly to verify compliance. Without cloud-init, one can run vmspec-verify inside the guest to verify manually. The tools are still under development, for example the ACPI test returns a failure even if the guest would support ACPI if forced. Feedback and patches are always welcome. The README.md lists a handful of guest images that have been used in testing. I’d be most happy to add more links to the list!
[1] http://www.linaro.org/app/resources/WhitePaper/VMSystemSpecificationForARM-v2.0.pdf
[2] https://github.com/linaro/vmspec-tools
[3] http://www.linaro.org/blog/core-dump/ensuring-bootable-arm-vm-images/
Full message:
https://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/cross-distro
Firmware Security 