pbot/doc/VirtualMachine.md

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.

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,driver.io=native,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.
• 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.

Configure virtual machine for PBot

Once the install finishes, click the Reboot button in the Fedora installer in the virtual machine window.

Set up serial ports

Now, while the virtual machine is rebooting, switch to a terminal on your host system. Go into the applets/compiler_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.

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.

If you 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.

Now we need to restart the virtual machine itself so it loads the new serial device configuration. Switch back to the virtual machine window. Once the virtual machine has rebooted, log in as root and shut the virtual machine down with:

 guest$ shutdown now -h

Once the machine has shutdown, bring it right back up with the following commands on the host:

host$ virsh start pbot-vm

Now the virtual machine will start back up in the background. To bring up a visible window to access the virtual machine, execute:

host$ virt-viewer pbot-vm

You should see the guest window after a few seconds. Log in as root once the login prompt appears.

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.

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 script.

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

That installs the minium packages for the Perl interpreter (note we used perl-interpreter instead of perl), as well as the Perl lib, IPC::Run, JSON::XS and English modules.

Install PBot VM Guest

Next we install the PBot VM Guest 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 /root directory. Feel free to chdir to /tmp if you prefer.

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/compiler_vm/guest .

Once that’s done, run the following command:

guest$ ./guest/bin/setup-guest

After running the setup-guest script, we need to make the environment changes take effect:

guest$ source /root/.bashrc

Start PBot VM Guest

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

guest$ start-guest

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 is listening for and can execute commands. The vm-exec command in the applets/compiler_vm/host/bin directory allows you to send commands from the shell.

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, execute the vm-server script in the applets/compiler_vm/host/bin directory on the host.

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 is alive.

You may override any of the defaults by setting environment variables.

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 heartbeats
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

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 applets/compiler_client.pl script (a copy of host/bin/vm-client) to send VM commands to port 9000.

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

<pragma-> sh echo hello
   <PBot> hello