Transferring the disk image

These instructions explain how to get a hypervisor reference image onto a supported hardware platform.

These instructions assume that you have prepared your board and downloaded the reference image and unpacked it to a convenient location on your host system (see the board-specific instructions in this chapter).

All reference images are provided as disk images. These disk images include two partitions: a bootable partition, and a data partition (see “Creating and transferring a hypervisor disk image” in the “Assembling a Hypervisor System and Its Components” chapter).

About removable media

The hardware platforms on which you can run a QNX Hypervisor system support a variety of different removable media, including USB key, micro SD cards, and SATA drives. Not all supported hardware platforms support the same removable media. This guide provides instructions for USB keys and micro SD cards, because each supported platform supports at least one of these types of removable media.

The reference images are approximately 200 MB when compressed, and expand to about 600 MB when extracted. For the removable storage we recommend:

micro SD card: 8 GB Class 10
USB key: 8 GB USB 3.0 flash drive

If your hardware platform has a SATA drive, you can use it instead of a USB key or micro SD card.

CAUTION:

Don't write to your storage medium's partition file (e.g., /dev/sdb1 or /dev/rdisk3s1). Write to the raw device file.

USB keys

You can use a USB key with all the hardware platforms supported by the hypervisor. If you use a USB key:

Don't use a USB key with security features.
If you have problems with your USB key, try reformatting it to a FAT32 filesystem, then converting the partition type to GPT. On a Windows system, you can use the MiniTool Partition Wizard Free tool to make these changes. Linux and macOS systems have their own tools, such as diskutil.

micro SD cards

If your platform supports micro SD cards, we recommend UHS-I cards for better read/write performance. These cards can be identified by a “U” with a number “1” inside it, as shown below:

Figure 1. The UHS-I identifier.

Linux

On a Linux host system, use these commandline instructions to copy a reference image to removable storage:

sudo dd bs=1024k if=base_dir/diskimage of=/dev/sdb

where base_dir is your hypervisor project working directory, diskimage is your hypervisor system disk image, and the USB key appears on your host system as /dev/sdb.

This command causes the dd utility to write 1 MB chunks of data to the removable storage at a time.

Note: The device name shouldn't include a partition suffix. For example, do not use /dev/sdb1. However, on some Linux variants, the device name may be /dev/mmcblk0.

macOS

On a macOS host system, use these commandline instructions to copy a reference image to removable storage:

diskutil umount/Volumes/VOLUME_LABEL
sudo dd bs=1024k if=base_dir/diskimage of=/dev/rdisk3

where base_dir is your hypervisor project working directory, diskimage is your hypervisor system disk image, and the USB key appears on your host system as /dev/disk3 (the rdisk* file is preferred over disk*).

This command causes the dd utility to write 1 MB chunks of data to the removable storage at a time.

Note: The device name shouldn't include a partition suffix. For example, don't use /dev/rdisk3s1.

Windows

To copy a disk image from a Windows host to a target, you need Win32 Disk Imager installed on your host system. If you don't have this utility, download it from this site, then install it: http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/.

On a Windows system, to copy a reference image to removable storage:

Run the Win32 Disk Imager.
Browse to the location where you placed the image, and click Open.
Click Write to write the .img file to your USB key.
Click Yes to begin the process of writing the image. When it's complete, you'll see the message “Write successful.”
Click OK, then exit Win32 Disk Imager.