Mugenhwcfg

Overview

mugenhwcfg is a Python tool developed to support the Muen Project. It retrieves hardware information from a running Linux system and produces a Muen hardware configuration file in XML format.

Requirements

mugenhwcfg requires Python 3. It also requires iasl (part of the acpica-tools package) and cpuid to be installed:

$ sudo apt-get install acpica-tools cpuid

Optionally, mugenhwcfg also uses the Python Package lxml to format the generated XML file. You can get it (if not yet installed) with either:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-lxml

or

$ sudo pip install lxml

Installing mugenhwcfg

mugenhwcfg can be obtained from the repository with the command:

$ git clone --recursive https://git.codelabs.ch/git/muen/mugenhwcfg.git

This clones all submodules required by the tool as well as the source files.

Running mugenhwcfg

After installation, mugenhwcfg can be run with the following commands:

$ sudo modprobe msr
$ cd mugenhwcfg
$ sudo ./mugenhwcfg.py

Root user permissions are necessary to allow mugenhwcfg to examine system data.

Output

After running the tool, the output XML file will be produced in the tool directory and will be named output.xml.

Any errors encountered by the tool will (by default) prevent the output file from being generated. The tool can attempt to generate an output file anyway (for manual editing) using the -f / --force argument.

Updating

As the tool relies on external files (such as the pci.ids repository), some of these files might need to be updated to retrieve accurate information. You can utilise the -u / --update argument to download and update these files automatically.

Optional Arguments

• -u / --update Update files used by the tool
• -f / --force Attempt to generate the output file despite errors

More about mugenhwcfg

How it works

mugenhwcfg scans Linux system files (/sys, /proc, /dev) for processor, memory and device information needed by the Muen kernel. It then fills up PyXB Python objects with the information and creates an XML file.

Use of PyXB Library

mugenhwcfg utilises the PyXB package to generate a Python binding file from a hardware configuration schema file which should be included with the tool distribution at /schema/hardware_config.xsd. This generation happens the first time the tool is run, at the location /generated/hardware_config.py. This binding file is then used to create and fill objects that are later converted to XML in the output.

The PyXB package is included as a submodule in the mugenhwcfg repository at: /contrib/pyxb

Use of pci.ids

To decode device names, mugenhwcfg parses the pci.ids file in /data/pci.ids. pci.ids is a repository of PCI identification numbers maintained by the good people here.

Running Tests

The mugenhwcfg tests require the Python package pytest:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pytest

or

$ sudo pip install pytest

After installing the required dependencies, the tests can be run with:

$ py.test-3

To produce a coverage report, execute the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pytest-cov
$ py.test-3 --cov=src

Append the --cov-report html option if a html report instead of terminal output is desired.

Additional information on generated hardware file

mugenhwcfg alters the following in the XML output hardware file to match the requirements of the Muen Kernel:

Memory

• Omit memory blocks that are reserved
• Size of memoryBlocks are rounded down to the nearest multiple of a page
• Sets "allocatable" to false for memoryBlocks at addresses < 1 MiB

Devices (PCI)

• Omit PCI Bridges
• Omit non PCI-Express devices behind bridges
• Size of memoryBlocks are rounded up to match the size of a page (4KiB)

Devices (Serial)

• Omits serial devices on ports other than COM ports

Contact

You can drop an email to the Muen development team's mailing list at

muen-dev@googlegroups.com

or contact the author (Chen Chin Jieh) directly at

chinjieh@gmail.com

Acknowledgements

Big thanks to Adrian and Reto for their unending guidance and advice!