Getting Started with HP's Fabric-Attached Memory Emulator

HP's The Machine

HPE has new hardware coming out soon called "The Machine".

If you want to write software for The Machine, you can start learning about it here:

https://github.com/FabricAttachedMemory/Emulation


I won't claim to be any sort of expert, but I was curious to try.  The point of this post is, don't let anything get in your way.  If you are not a "guru" - just do whatever you need to do and there will be something learned in the process.


Run Debian 8.x

I'm on a Windows Vista PC, and I already have Oracle VirtualBox installed, so it wasn't very difficult to start a virtual machine that runs Debian 8.2.0.  I got my Debian distro here for an i386, but you might need a different target processor if you're running an AMD machine.  It's an iso file, and has to be burned to a boot disk (supported in newer versions of Windows, on my old Vista box it brings up Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 for burning an iso to a disk).  Alternatively you could use real hardware to install Debian, or a VM in AWS et. al. - you might even be able to do this on a raspberry pi (though I doubt it due to version requirements of the package).

NOTE: When setting up the virtual machine, the HD must have at least 19GB free, so I recommend something larger.  After more than 1 attempt, I was able to succeed with a 27GB HD fixed size HD for the VM.  It looks like 22GB would have been enough.

If you are new to Debian, try finding Search and type "terminal" to open a terminal.  My Debian install did not run sudo from the terminal.  That's okay.


Install Git

For now I'll ignore no sudo.  After installing Debian, and logging in as a user, I could log in as root via "su", and then:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install git-core

then log out of root and go to the user's ~ home directory and run:

$ git clone https://github.com/FabricAttachedMemory/Emulation.git

This resulted in an Emulation directory and I could run:

$ ./emulation_configure.bash 1

which failed with:

Error: The Following command(s) are needed:
vmdebootstrap virsh sudo qemu-img brctl



Install QEMU, vmdebootstrap and libvirt-bin

From root:

$ apt-get install qemu-kvm

$ apt-get install vmdebootstrap

if you need sudo:

$ apt-get install sudo

and finally:

$ apt-get install libvirt-bin



Run it (still from root):

$ ./emulation_configure.bash 1

It asks:

Change /usr/lib/qemu-bridge-helper to setuid root (yes/no) ?

yes

Error: /tmp has less than 19 G free

At this point I couldn't find any way to extend the HD on the VM.  If needed you might try creating another volume and mounting it - but I started over.

With adequate HD on the VM, it now complains "No proxy setting can be ascertained", then eventually:

Failure trying to run: chroot /tmp/tmpDx8e9z mount -t proc proc /proc

and

Build of /tmp/fabric_template.img failed

Looking into the documentation at https://github.com/FabricAttachedMemory/Emulation.git might give some clues where to go next, but that's as far as I will go today.  Thanks.