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Julia Evans

Day 42: Writing a Go program to manage Firecracker VMs

• rc-2020 •

Hello! On Tuesday I spent more time working on figuring out how to run VMs with Firecracker for my SSH game project. They still start super fast and I’m really excited about them.

I got through 3 main things:

  • learned 1 new thing about how linux bridges work
  • figured out how to make my Ubuntu VMs boot fast
  • wrote a small Go server to manage Firecracker VMs

a linux bridge isn’t just a bridge

Every single time I say I’m confused about bridges someone will tell me “well, you see julia, a bridge is like a virtual switch”. This has never made any sense to me because I’ve never used a switch either, and also I felt like there was just something off about that explanation and that it didn’t explain the behavior I was seeing in a way I couldn’t articulate.

I think I finally learned something concrete about why bridges are confusing though! On Linux, when you create a bridge you get an network interface (like docker0 for the Docker bridge). And that network interface has an ip address, and you can use that network interface/ip address as a gateway for containers/VMs you’re running.

But switches don’t have IP addresses! So if “a bridge is like a switch”, what’s going on? A bridge doesn’t really seems like it’s a switch! This analogy really seems to be breaking down. Someone on Twitter finally explained yesterday to me that when you create a bridge on Linux by default, you actually get 2 things:

  1. a bridge (the kind that’s “like a switch”, that doesn’t have an ip address and just forwards packets blindly)
  2. a network interface with the same name as the bridge, which has an IP address that you can use as a gateway.

They said that if you want, you can delete the network interface part of the bridge. I still haven’t experimented enough to work this out but I feel really good about this piece of information and like I can use it to properly understand what a Linux bridge is later.

Also I feel kind of vindicated in disbelieving this “a bridge is like a switch” explanation because I guess it’s technically true but it’s definitely missing a key piece of information for Linux bridges.

fixed my Ubuntu VMs taking 2 minutes to boot

My Ubuntu Firecracker VMs had been taking 2-3 minutes to boot. They were hanging on a systemd step called “Load/Save Random Seed”, which apparently has something to do with kernel entropy.

I googled this and tried a lot of different things to fix it. Here are all the things that I tried that did not work:

  1. add random.trust_cpu=on to kernel boot args
  2. set SYSTEMD_RANDOM_SEED_CREDIT=true in systemd-random-seed.service
  3. set SYSTEMD_RANDOM_SEED_CREDIT=force in systemd-random-seed.service
  4. install & enable haveged
  5. install rng-tools
  6. systemctl disable systemd-random-seed (though this really SHOULD have worked, I think I did something wrong there)

Finally I changed the timeout in the systemd-random-service file to 2 seconds, which worked! Now my VMs start fast. It’s extremely possible that I actually need this entropy generation for some reason (maybe to give sshd enough entropy so that it can generate session keys securely?) but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

So now I can start an Ubuntu virtual machine in like 5 seconds! It’s really amazing. It’s probably possible to bring the boot time a bit more but I’m happy with that.

wrote a Go program to manage Firecracker VMs

So far I’ve been starting VMs with the DigitalOcean API. So I wanted to write my own little API to create Firecracker VMs. It was pretty straightforward because I mostly just copied a bunch of code from this Firecracker command line tool called firectl: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firectl

Here’s a gist with my (pretty messy) code so far: firecracker-manager.go.

what my API looks like so far

It totally works! I can start a VM with:

echo '{
    "root_image_path":  "/images/ubuntu.ext4",
    "kernel_path":    "/images/vmlinux"
}' | http post http://localhost:8080/create

and I can stop it with:

echo '{"id": "DE52E8A0-C624-18CB-F948-0B50C77C8F4A"}'  | http post localhost:8080/delete

It’s still missing some things, like:

  • I should probably use the firecracker jailer for better security (like firectl does)
  • right now I’m still writing the VM’s serial output to stdout
  • I might make it REST-y and use a DELETE request to stop a VM

and probably lots more things I’m not thinking of right now

Day 41: Trying to understand what a bridge is Day 43: Building VM images