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Virtual Machine

PBot can interact with a virtual machine to safely execute arbitrary user-submitted system commands and code.

This document will guide you through installing and configuring a virtual machine by using the widely available libvirt project tools, such as virt-install, virsh, virt-manager, virt-viewer, etc.

If you’re more comfortable working with QEMU directly instead, feel free to do that. I hope this guide will answer everything you need to know to set that up. If not, open an GitHub issue or /msg me on IRC.

Some quick terminology:

  • host: your physical Linux system hosting the virtual machine
  • guest: the Linux system installed inside the virtual machine

The commands below will be prefixed with host$ or guest$ to reflect where the command should be executed.

Many commands can be configured with environment variables. If a variable is not defined, a sensible default value will be used.

Environment variable Default value Description
PBOTVM_DOMAIN pbot-vm The libvirt domain identifier
PBOTVM_SERVER 9000 vm-server port for incoming vm-client commands
PBOTVM_SERIAL 5555 TCP port for serial communication
PBOTVM_HEART 5556 TCP port for serial heartbeats
PBOTVM_CID 7 Context ID for VM socket (if using VSOCK)
PBOTVM_VPORT 5555 VM socket service port (if using VSOCK)
PBOTVM_TIMEOUT 10 Duration before command times out (in seconds)
PBOTVM_NOREVERT not set If set then the VM will not revert to previous snapshot

Initial virtual machine set-up

These steps need to be done only once during the first-time set-up.

Prerequisites

CPU Virtualization Technology

Ensure CPU Virtualization Technology is enabled in your motherboard BIOS.

host$ egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

If you see your CPUs listed with vmx or svm flags, you’re good to go. Otherwise, consult your motherboard manual to see how to enable VT.

KVM

Ensure KVM is set up and loaded.

host$ kvm-ok
INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used

If you see the above, everything’s set up. Otherwise, consult your operating system manual or KVM manual to install and load KVM.

libvirt and QEMU

Ensure libvirt and QEMU are installed and ready.

host$ virsh version --daemon
Compiled against library: libvirt 7.6.0
Using library: libvirt 7.6.0
Using API: QEMU 7.6.0
Running hypervisor: QEMU 6.0.0
Running against daemon: 7.6.0

If there’s anything missing, please consult your operating system manual to install the libvirt and QEMU packages.

On Ubuntu: sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system

Make a pbot-vm user or directory

You can either make a new user account or make a new directory in your current user account. In either case, name it pbot-vm so we’ll have a home for the virtual machine.

Add libvirt group to your user

Add your user (or the pbot-vm user) to the libvirt group.

host$ sudo adduser $USER libvirt

Log out and then log back in for the new group to take effect.

Download Linux ISO

Download a preferred Linux ISO. For this guide, we’ll use Fedora. Why? I’m using Fedora Rawhide for my PBot VM because I want convenient and reliable access to the latest bleeding-edge versions of software.

I recommend using the Fedora Stable net-installer for this guide unless you are more comfortable in another Linux distribution. Make sure you choose the minimal install option without a graphical desktop.

https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/35/Server/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Server-netinst-x86_64-35-1.2.iso is the Fedora Stable net-installer ISO used in this guide.

Create a new virtual machine

To create a new virtual machine we’ll use the virt-install command.

  • First, ensure you are the pbot-vm user or that you have changed your current working directory to pbot-vm. The Linux ISO downloaded earlier should be present in this location.

Execute the following command:

host$ virt-install --name=pbot-vm --disk=size=12,path=vm.qcow2 --cpu=host --os-variant=fedora34 --graphics=spice --video=virtio --location=Fedora-Server-netinst-x86_64-35-1.2.iso

Note that disk=size=12 will create a 12 GB sparse file. Sparse means the file won’t actually take up 12 GB. It will start at 0 bytes and grow as needed. You can use the du command to verify this. After a minimal Fedora install, the size will be approximately 1.7 GB. It will grow to about 2.5 GB with all PBot features installed.

For further information about virt-install, read its manual page. While the above command should give sufficient performance and compatability, there are a great many options worth investigating if you want to fine-tune your virtual machine.

Install Linux in the virtual machine

After executing the virt-install command above, you should now see a window showing Linux booting up and launching an installer. For this guide, we’ll walk through the Fedora 35 installer. You can adapt these steps for your own distribution of choice.

  • Click Partition disks. Don’t change anything. Click Done.
  • Click Root account. Click Enable root account. Set a password. Click Done.
  • Click User creation. Create a new user. Skip Fullname and set Username to vm. Untick Add to wheel or Set as administrator. Untick Require password. Click Done.
  • Wait until Software selection is done processing and is no longer greyed out. Click it. Change install from Server to Minimal. Click Done.
  • Click Begin installation.

Installation will need to download about 328 RPMs consisting of about 425 MB. It’ll take 5 minutes to an hour or longer depending on your hardware and network configuration.

Set up serial ports

While the installation is in progress, switch to a terminal on your host system. Go into the applets/pbot-vm/host/devices directory and run the add-serials script to add the serial-2.xml and serial-3.xml files to the configuration for the pbot-vm libvirt machine.

host$ ./add-serials

This will enable the /dev/ttyS1 and /dev/ttyS2 serial ports in the guest and connect them to the following TCP addresses on the host: 127.0.0.1:5555 and 127.0.0.1:5556, respectively. ttyS1/5555 is the data channel used to send commands or code to the virtual machine and to read back output. ttyS2/5556 is simply a newline sent every 5 seconds, representing a heartbeat, used to ensure that the PBot communication channel is healthy.

You may use the PBOTVM_DOMAIN, PBOTVM_SERIAL and PBOTVM_HEART environment variables to override the default values. To use ports 7777 and 7778 instead:

host$ PBOTVM_SERIAL=7777 PBOTVM_HEART=7778 ./add-serials

If you later want to change the serial ports or the TCP ports, execute the command virsh edit pbot-vm on the host. This will open the pbot-vm XML configuration in your default system editor. Find the <serial> tags and edit their attributes.

Set up virtio-vsock

VM sockets (AF_VSOCK) are a Linux-specific feature (at the time of this writing). They are the preferred way for PBot to communicate with the PBot VM Guest server. Serial communication has several limitations. See https://vmsplice.net/~stefan/stefanha-kvm-forum-2015.pdf for an excellent overview.

To use VM sockets with QEMU and virtio-vsock, you need:

  • a Linux hypervisor with kernel 4.8+
  • a Linux virtual machine on that hypervisor with kernel 4.8+
  • QEMU 2.8+ on the hypervisor, running the virtual machine
  • socat version 1.7.4+

If you do not meet these requirements, the PBot VM will fallback to using serial communication. You may explicitly disable VM sockets by setting PBOTVM_CID=0. You can skip reading the rest of this section.

If you do want to use VM sockets, read on.

First, ensure the vhost_vsock Linux kernel module is loaded on the host:

host$ lsmod | grep vsock
vhost_vsock            24576  1
vsock                  45056  2 vmw_vsock_virtio_transport_common,vhost_vsock
vhost                  53248  2 vhost_vsock,vhost_net

If the module is not loaded, load it with:

host$ sudo modprobe vhost_vsock

Once the module is loaded, you should have the following character devices:

host$ ls -l /dev/vhost-vsock
crw------- 1 root root 10, 53 May  4 11:55 /dev/vhost-vsock
host$ ls -l /dev/vsock
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 10, 54 May  4 11:55 /dev/vsock

A VM sockets address is comprised of a context ID (CID) and a port; just like an IP address and TCP/UDP port. The CID is represented using an unsigned 32-bit integer. It identifies a given machine as either a hypervisor or a virtual machine. Several addresses are reserved, including 0, 1, and the maximum value for a 32-bit integer: 0xffffffff. The hypervisor is always assigned a CID of 2, and VMs can be assigned any CID between 3 and 0xffffffff — 1.

We must attach a vhost-vsock-pci device to the guest to enable VM sockets communication. Each VM on a hypervisor must have a unique context ID (CID). Each service within the VM must have a unique port. The PBot VM Guest defaults to 7 for the CID and 5555 for the port.

While still in the applets/pbot-vm/host/devices directory, run the add-vsock script:

host$ ./add-vsock

or to configure a different CID:

host$ PBOTVM_CID=42 ./add-vsock

In the VM guest (once it reboots), there should be a /dev/vsock device:

guest$ ls -l /dev/vsock
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 10, 55 May  4 13:21 /dev/vsock

Reboot virtual machine

Once the Linux installation completes inside the virtual machine, click the Reboot button in the installer window. Login as root when the virtual machine boots back up.

Install software

Now we can install any software and programming languages we want to make available in the virtual machine. Use the dnf search command or your distribution’s documentation to find packages. I will soon make available a script to install all package necessary for all languages supported by PBot.

To make use of VM sockets, install the socat package:

guest$ dnf install socat

For the C programming language you will need at least these:

guest$ dnf install libubsan libasan gdb gcc clang

Install Perl

Now we need to install Perl on the guest. This allows us to run the PBot VM Guest server script.

guest$ dnf install perl-interpreter perl-lib perl-IPC-Run perl-JSON-XS perl-English perl-IPC-Shareable

That installs the minium packages for the Perl interpreter (note we used perl-interpreter instead of perl), as well as a few Perl modules.

Install PBot VM Guest

Next we install the PBot VM Guest server script that fosters communication between the virtual machine guest and the physical host system. We’ll do this inside the virtual machine guest system, logged on as root while in the /tmp directory.

guest$ chdir /tmp

The rsync command isn’t installed with a Fedora minimal install, but scp is available. Replace 192.168.100.42 below with your own local IP address; user with the user account that has the PBot directory; and pbot with the path to the directory.

guest$ scp -r user@192.168.100.42:~/pbot/applets/pbot-vm/guest .

Once that’s done, run the following command:

guest$ ./guest/bin/setup-guest

This will install guest-server to /usr/local/bin/, set up some environment variables and harden the guest system. After running the setup-guest script, we need to make the environment changes take effect:

guest$ source /root/.bashrc

We no longer need the /tmp/guest/ stuff. We can delete it:

guest$ rm -rf guest/

Start PBot VM Guest

We’re ready to start the PBot VM Guest server. On the guest, as root, execute the command:

guest$ guest-server

This starts up a server to listen for incoming commands or code and to handle them. We’ll leave this running.

Test PBot VM Guest

Let’s make sure everything’s working up to this point. On the host, there should be two open TCP ports on 5555 and 5556. On the host, execute the command:

host$ nc -zv 127.0.0.1 5555-5556

If it says anything other than Connection succeeded then make sure you have completed the steps under Set up serial ports and that your network configuration is allowing access.

Let’s make sure the PBot VM Guest server is listening for and can execute commands. The vm-exec command allows you to send commands from the shell. Change your currect working directory to applets/pbot-vm/host/bin and run the vm-exec command:

host$ cd applets/pbot-vm/host/bin
host$ ./vm-exec -lang=sh echo hello world

This should output some logging noise followed by “hello world”. You can test other language modules by changing the -lang= option. I recommend testing and verifying that all of your desired language modules are configured before going on to the next step.

If you have multiple PBot VM Guests, or if you used a different TCP port, you can specify the PBOTVM_SERIAL environment variable when executing the vm-exec command:

host$ PBOTVM_SERIAL=7777 ./vm-exec -lang=sh echo test

Save initial state

Switch back to an available terminal on the physical host machine. Enter the following command to save a snapshot of the virtual machine waiting for incoming commands.

  • Before doing this step, ensure all commands are cached by executing them at least once. For example, the gcc and gdb commands take a long time to load into memory. The initial execution may take a several long seconds to complete. Once completed, the command will be cached. Future invocations will execute significantly quicker.
host$ virsh snapshot-create-as pbot-vm 1

If the virtual machine ever times-out or its heartbeat stops responding, PBot will revert the virtual machine to this saved snapshot.

Initial virtual machine set-up complete

This concludes the initial one-time set-up. You can close the virt-viewer window. The virtual machine will continue running in the background until it is manually shutdown (via shutdown now -h inside the VM or via virsh shutdown pbot-vm on the host).

Start PBot VM Host

To start the PBot VM Host server, change your current working directory to applets/pbot-vm/host/bin and execute the vm-server script:

host$ cd applets/pbot-vm/host/bin
host$ ./vm-server

This will start a TCP server on port 9000. It will listen for incoming commands and pass them along to the virtual machine’s TCP serial port 5555. It will also monitor the heartbeat port 5556 to ensure the PBot VM Guest server is alive.

You may override any of the defaults by setting environment variables. For example, to use other-vm with a longer 30 second timeout, on different serial and heartbeat ports:

host$ PBOTVM_DOMAIN="other-vm" PBOTVM_SERVER=9001 PBOTVM_SERIAL=7777 PBOTVM_HEART=7778 PBOTVM_TIMEOUT=30 ./vm-server

Test PBot

All done. Everything is set up now.

PBot is already preconfigured with commands that invoke the host/bin/vm-client script to send VM commands to vm-server on the default port 9000:

 <pragma-> factshow sh
    <PBot> [global] sh: /call cc -lang=sh
 <pragma-> factshow cc
    <PBot> [global] cc: /call compiler {"nick":"$nick:json","channel":"$channel:json","code":"$args:json"}
 <pragma-> factshow compiler
    <PBot> [global] compiler: pbot-vm/host/bin/vm-client [applet]

In your instance of PBot, the sh echo hello command should output hello.

<pragma-> sh echo hello
   <PBot> hello