Transferring the disk image

These instructions explain how to get a QHS or other QNX hypervisor system onto a supported hardware platform.

They assume that you prepared your supported board, and have built your hypervisor system. As a minimum this system includes a hypervisor host; in most cases it will have a hypervisor host and at least one guest.

About removable media

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

The images expand to about 2 GB when extracted. For the removable storage we recommend:

SD or micro SD card, depending on the board: 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 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.

SD cards

If your platform supports SD or 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 an 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.

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 an 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.