Installing an OpenBSD virtual machine¶
Introduction¶
These are my notes about the installation of an OpenBSD 6.6 virtual machine on my Debian GNU/Linux stable system (“AMD64” architecture).
The process is very similar to the installation of a Debian GNU/Linux virtual machine and this page does not repeat all the details and mentions only the specific actions.
If you’re looking for information about the post-install configuration and usage of the OpenBSD system, the “My first steps with OpenBSD” page may be more interesting.
Installing the OpenBSD signing and verifying tool¶
On a Debian GNU/Linux system, you can install the OpenBSD signing and verifying tool (as root) with:
apt-get install signify-openbsd # As root.
Getting and verifying the OpenBSD installer ISO image¶
OpenBSD installer images can be obtained from many servers. I use
ftp.fr.openbsd.org. I choose to download the small ISO image (cd66.iso) and
let the installer download the file sets from the Internet.
Here are the commands I use to download the installer image and the other files needed for the verification:
mkdir -p ~/vm/installer_iso/openbsd_6.6
cd ~/vm/installer_iso/openbsd_6.6
wget https://ftp.fr.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.6/amd64/cd66.iso
wget https://ftp.fr.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.6/amd64/SHA256
wget https://ftp.fr.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.6/amd64/SHA256.sig
wget https://ftp.fr.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.6/openbsd-66-base.pub
Then I do the verification with:
signify-openbsd -C -p openbsd-66-base.pub -x SHA256.sig cd66.iso
Creating the OpenBSD virtual machine¶
Start the installation¶
It consists in running a virt-install command, very much like for the
Debian unstable virtual machine creation.
Don’t forget to start the default virtual network and to run the needed commands so that applications running as root can connect to the X server.
Use osinfo-query os to find the most appropriate value for the
--os-variant option (the closest value to the OS you’re installing).
Here is the exact virt-install command I use:
virt-install --name openbsd_6.6 \
--memory 1024 \
--vcpus=1 \
--cdrom cd66.iso \
--disk pool=default,size=10 \
--os-variant openbsd6.3 \
--graphics spice \
--channel spicevmc & # As root.
One precision though: This doesn’t work on one of my PC (one with a AMD Phenom II X2 555 CPU). OpenBSD fails to boot (kernel panic). The console says “Fatal protection fault in supervisor mode”. It looks very much like the problem discussed in this OpenBSD guest in bhyve on AMD CPU thread.
One solution is to expose a different CPU to the guest (using the --cpu
opton of virt-install). The output of virsh domcapabilities helped me
find possible values for the --cpu option. kvm64 seems to be a working
value.
So on the PC with the AMD CPU, the exact virt-install command I use is:
virt-install --name openbsd_6.6 \
--cpu kvm64 \
--memory 1024 \
--vcpus=1 \
--cdrom cd66.iso \
--disk pool=default,size=10 \
--os-variant openbsd6.3 \
--graphics spice \
--channel spicevmc & # As root.
OpenBSD base installation¶
Not much to say here. I haven’t had any major difficulty doing the base installation.
