Requirement
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Overview
This comes alongside "Winter" as a famous TV show would say. 
. Mion is an interesting Operating System meant to run on network appliance. It is built on top of Yocto project and inherently share its root with Linux Open Embedded system. In order to learn more about the Operating system I invite you to read Mion project page.
Why consider such an OS you would say ? It actually boils down to:
- having a minimalistic Operating system with the smallest software footprint.
- predictable Operating System with the minimum software requirement
- A supported Operating System powered by a regular release cycle
Note
While trying to reach a minimalistic image in order to run the RARE software, for now we only managed to have a 5Gb image (with INTEL SDE installed). We are confident that we can still slimmed down the image but times is running against us. The very initial Mion image has a size of 45Mbytes !
Tip
Mion will support multiple network equipments ranging from APS bf2556x-1t, bf6064x, Edgecore wedge100bf32x and wedge100bf65x and many more (Delta, asgvolt64 etc.)
Article objective
In this article, we will present :
- how to build Mion from scratch
- how to install it on our favorites P4 switches (bf2556x-1t and wedge-100bf-32x)
[ #001 ] - Cookbook
Mion docs has an excellent getting started page. In this section we will emphasize how easy it is to build Mion. First, make sure you have a machine compliant to the "Build host" requirements. Install a pristine Debian 10 and you should be go to go ...
sudo apt-get install gawk wget git-core diffstat unzip texinfo gcc-multilib \
build-essential chrpath socat cpio python3 python3-pip python3-pexpect \
xz-utils debianutils iputils-ping python3-git python3-jinja2 libegl1-mesa \
libsdl1.2-dev pylint3 xterm
git clone --recursive git@github.com:NetworkGradeLinux/mion.git cd mion # To obtain related mion layers: git clone git@github.com:NetworkGradeLinux/meta-mion.git # Obtain the mion hardware layer git clone git@github.com:NetworkGradeLinux/meta-mion-bsp.git
Note
The above steps require you have a GitHub account and uploaded public key to your account. You'll also have to activate ssh-agent as the build script will fetch software from Git using SSH transport.
source openembedded-core/oe-init-build-env
time ../mc_build.sh -m stordis-bf2556x-1t -h host-onie:mion-onie-image-onlpv1
Sstate summary: Wanted 1251 Found 0 Missed 1251 Current 0 (0% match, 0% complete) NOTE: Executing Tasks WARNING: mc:host-onie:expat-native-2.2.9-r0 do_fetch: Failed to fetch URL https://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.2.9.tar.bz2, attempting MIRRORS if available NOTE: Tasks Summary: Attempted 3161 tasks of which 1 didn't need to be rerun and all succeeded. Summary: There was 1 WARNING message shown. real 150m43.758s user 0m16.407s sys 0m3.836s
Tip
Even if the build process can be long depending on your build host, build duration can reach 30 minutes with a 32 cores machines. Subsequent builds will take significantly less time as a cache mechanism will avoid to to redo the whole build process.
Believe me, you are done !
Just wait the end of the build process and grab the freshly baked image.
Sstate summary: Wanted 0 Found 0 Missed 0 Current 1251 (0% match, 100% complete) NOTE: Executing Tasks NOTE: Tasks Summary: Attempted 3161 tasks of which 3161 didn't need to be rerun and all succeeded. real 0m27.430s user 0m1.939s sys 0m0.585s
p4@mion-build-host:~/mion/build$ cd tmp-glibc/deploy/images/stordis-bf2556x-1t/ p4@mion-build-host:~/mion/build/tmp-glibc/deploy/images/stordis-bf2556x-1t$ ls bzImage bzImage--5.4.49+git0+d626f9108d_ec485bd4af-r0-stordis-bf2556x-1t-20201216195930.bin bzImage-stordis-bf2556x-1t.bin grub-efi-bootx64.efi mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t-20201216195930.rootfs.ext4 mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t-20201216195930.rootfs.manifest mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t-20201216195930.rootfs.tar.bz2 mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t-20201216195930.rootfs.tar.xz mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t-20201216195930.rootfs.tar.xz.bmap mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t-20201216195930.testdata.json mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t.ext4 mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t.manifest mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t.tar.bz2 mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t.tar.xz mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t.tar.xz.bmap mion-onie-image-onlpv1-stordis-bf2556x-1t.testdata.json modules--5.4.49+git0+d626f9108d_ec485bd4af-r0-stordis-bf2556x-1t-20201216195930.tgz modules-stordis-bf2556x-1t.tgz onie-installer.bin onie-installer-x86_64-stordis_bf2556x_1t.bin
Of course get onie-installer-x86_64-stordis_bf2556x_1t.bin image and you are good to go for next section
- Boot bf2556x-1t via ONIE rescue session
- put you Mion image at the root of a web server
onie-nos-install http://<your_web_server>/onie-installer-x86_64-stordis_bf2556x_1t.bin
Once the installation has finished, your system reboot and you'll be rewarded by Mion Grub welcome page:
Tip
And in just 1 minute 
you have installed a minimalistic OS on your bf2556x-1t. In this post we will stop here. However, in order to finalise the installation you'll to install INTEL P4 Software Development Environment as of course you'll want to run your P4 program on the bf2556x-1t. We will cover this subsequent installation in a subsequent post.
Conclusion
In this short article we saw:
- how to build Mion
- how to install Mion (process is the same on every ONIE based system: we tested bf2556x-1t, bf6064x wedge100bf-32x, wedge100bf-64x)
Please let us know if you want us to test your P4 platform with the RARE P4 software. We will then add it to the RARE Hardware Compatibility List (RARE HCL) !
(In that case you might have to arrange access to your P4 equipment or better ... Send us a sample ! )
Final words
Mion build is quite straightforward. As it share its root from Yocto, adding specificities related to your project is easy. Most probably a Bitbake recipe already exist and you'll just have to add a reference to the layer of your interest in Bitbake config file. First time build can be long and tedious if you have a small build host machine but subsequent build will be faster thanks to the sstate cache mechanism.
Last but not least, we covered only the base OS installation, now that you have a minimal OS required to manage your machine, you need to add specific drivers and software needed to run P4 programs on APS or WEDGE platform.