Running Fedora on FireSim

All workload-generation related commands and code are in firesim/sw/firesim-software.

FireMarshal comes with a Fedora-based workload that you can use right out of the box in workloads/fedora-base.json. We begin by building the workload (filesystem and boot-binary):

./marshal build workloads/fedora-base.json

The first time you build a workload may take a long time (we need to download and decompress a pre-built fedora image), but subsequent builds of the same base will use cached results. Once the command completes, you should see two new files in images/: fedora-base-bin and fedora-base.img. These are the boot-binary (linux + boot loader) and root filesystem (respectively). We can now launch this workload in qemu:

./marshal launch workloads/fedora-base.json

You should now see linux booting and be presented with a login prompt. Sign in as ‘root’ with password ‘firesim’. From here you can download files, use the package manager (e.g. ‘dnf install’), and generally use the image as if it had booted on real hardware with an internet connection. Any changes you make here will be persistent between reboots. Once you are done exploring, simply shutdown the workload:

$ poweroff

It is typically not a good idea to modify the *-base workloads directly since many other workloads might inherit those changes. To make sure that we’ve cleaned out any changes, let’s clean and rebuild the workload:

./marshal clean workloads/fedora-base.json
./marshal build workloads/fedora-base.json

Note that this build took significantly less time than the first; FireMarshal caches intermediate build steps whenever possible. The final step is to run this workload on the real firesim RTL with full timing accuracy. For the basic fedora distribution, we will use the pre-made firesim config at firesim/deploy/workloads/fedora-uniform.json. Simply change the workloadname option in firesim/deploy/config_runtime.ini to “fedora-uniform.json” and then follow the standard FireSim procedure for booting a workload (e.g. Running a Single Node Simulation or Running a Cluster Simulation).

Attention

For the standard distributions we provide pre-built firesim workloads. In general, FireMarshal can derive a FireSim workload from the FireMarshal configuration using the install command. For more information, see the official FireMarshal documentation.