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Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

Virtualization on Slackware Aarch64

OUTDATED: Please refer to the updated installation guide, here

This is a WIP set of notes that will eventually become an installation guide to build a virtualization stack with qemu on SA64

The software mentioned here all have an existing SlackBuild on SlackBuilds.org.

  • Qemu
  • Libvirt
  • Virt-Manager
  • Netcat-openbsd

Preparation

Clone the latest SlackBuild git repository

 git clone git://git.slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds.git 

Checkout a new branch within the local repository.

git checkout -b aarch64

Find and replace the support for x86_64 with that of aarch64 architecture. Verify that the current directory is the local repo.

cd /data/slackbuilds
sed -i 's/x86_/aarch/g' */*/*.SlackBuild

Commit the changes to the “aarch64” branch:

git add .
git commmit -m "Add aarch64 support."

I install sbopkg found at https://sbopkg.org to build the packages required for virtualization.

installpkg sbopkg*wsr.t?z

Add the following file to the sbopkg configuration in /etc/sbopkg/repos.d/100-ble-current-aarch64.repo.

SA64 aarch64 "SA64 git repository for -current" _ble git /data/slackbuilds@aarch64 ""
  • Where /data/slackbuilds is the location of the slackbuilds cloned repository.
  • Where _ble is the tag used to identify all built packages

Installation

Replace the standard netcat package (nc) with the netcat-openbsd package on SlackBuilds.org to enable remote access to Virt Manager

removepkg nc

Optionally blacklist nc in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist to avoid accidental reinstallation during a system update.

Pull our changes from the local repository into the sbopkg file structure:

sbopkg -r

Create queue files:

sqg -a -j$(nproc)

Build and install the packages.

sbopkg -i "qemu virt-manager libvirt netcat-openbsd"

After some time sbopkg will report it has successfully installed the virtualization stack.

Start the Libvirt daemon:

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt
/etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt start
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