Build Static Binaries for urunc-Supported Monitors

This repository provides a reference setup for building and distributing static binaries of monitors and tools supported by urunc.

Supported Monitors and Tools

The following components are currently supported:

• QEMU
• Firecracker
• Cloud-Hypervisor
• Hyperlight-Unikraft (hluk)
• Solo5
• virtiofsd

How to use

This repository serves as a hub for storing various builds of urunc's supported monitors and provides an easy platform for building both newer and older versions of them.

Every user can request the build of any monitor version by opening a new Pull Request (PR). The process is the following one:

1. Specify the monitor version to build: The version of each monitor is specified in the VERSION file located in its respective directory (e.g., for Solo5, the version is in solo5/VERSION). For Qemu, Solo5 and Virtiofsd, the COMMIT file in the same directory has to be updated as well, with the full hash of the commit that the version's tag points to (see Source verification).
2. Open a new PR: Create new PR with the version change.
3. PR workflow gets triggered: Upon opening a new PR a workflow will check whether a) the latest release already contains all the requested monitors and b) previous releases contain some of them. The monitors that are not found in a release are built. The workflow will comment in the PR with the findings
4. Merge of PR and creation of new relase: Upon the approval and merge of the PR in the main branch, a new workflow will collect the monitors, either from previous releases or by building them again, and create a new release following the release versioning scheme.

Note for QEMU

Since QEMU is highly configurable, the build process also tracks changes in the following configuration files:

• amd64.config: Configuration for building Qemu on amd64 architectures,
• arm64.config: Configuration for building Qemu on arm64 architectures.
• excluded files list: the list with the excluded files from the final Qemu installation directory.

Source verification

The monitors are either built from source or downloaded as prebuilt binaries from their upstream releases. In both cases, the workflows verify what they fetch and fail if the verification does not pass:

• Qemu, Solo5 and Virtiofsd are built from a clone of the version's tag. Since a tag can be moved, the workflow checks that the cloned tag points to the commit in the respective COMMIT file (e.g. solo5/COMMIT). To find the commit of a tag:

  git ls-remote --tags <repository> <version> <version>^{}
  

  For annotated tags (e.g. Qemu and Virtiofsd) the commit is the one of the ^{} line.
• Firecracker, Cloud-Hypervisor and Hyperlight-Unikraft are downloaded from their GitHub releases and their sha256 is checked. For Firecracker, against the checksum file of the release, for Cloud-Hypervisor, against the digest that GitHub provides for the release asset and for Hyperlight-Unikraft, against the SHA256SUMS file of the release.

Release Versioning Scheme

Releases are named vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH (e.g. v0.1.0):

• MAJOR and MINOR are specified in the top-level VERSION file (e.g. v0.1) and they are bumped manually with a PR.
• PATCH is bumped automatically. Upon a merge in the main branch, a new release is created only if the monitors differ from the ones in the latest release of the same MAJOR.MINOR series. For Qemu, Solo5 and Virtiofsd, which are built from source, this includes any change in their directory (e.g. their COMMIT file or the Qemu configuration files) or in their build workflow, since such a change leads to a new build. The first release of a new series gets PATCH 0.

The versions of the monitors that a release contains are listed in its description.

Release Artifacts

Each release contains the following artifacts for both amd64 and arm64 (<arch>):

Artifact	Contents
firecracker-<arch>	Firecracker static binary
cloud-hypervisor-<arch>	Cloud-Hypervisor static binary
hluk-<arch>	Hyperlight-Unikraft static binary
solo5-hvt-<arch>	Solo5-hvt static binary
solo5-spt-<arch>	Solo5-spt static binary
virtiofsd-<arch>	Virtiofsd static binary
qemu-<arch>.tar.gz	Qemu static binary along with its firmware files
<monitors>-<arch>.tar.gz	All of the above in a single tar

<monitors> lists the versions of all monitors:

FC-<firecracker_version>_CLH-<cloud-hypervisor-version>_HLUK-<hyperlight-unikraft_version>_S5-<solo5_version>_VFS-<virtiofsd_version>_QM-<qemu_version>-<qemu_config_and_exclude_files_hash>

e.g. FC-v1.7.0_CLH-v50.0_HLUK-v0.18.0_S5-v0.12.1_VFS-v1.13.0_QM-v10.1.1-9a44e-amd64.tar.gz.

Both tars contain a urunc/ directory and Qemu expects to find its files under /opt/urunc. Therefore, they should be extracted with:

sudo tar -C /opt -xzf qemu-<arch>.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /opt -xzf <monitors>-<arch>.tar.gz