[Tails-dev] Seeking advice on building Tails in a VM

Delete this message

Reply to this message
Author: Santhosh
Date:  
To: tails-dev
CC: Sofia Celi, cristina
Subject: [Tails-dev] Seeking advice on building Tails in a VM
Hello Tails Development Team

I was going through some of the documentation regarding building[1]
"Tails" distribution. I have hit a wall regarding continuing the build
beyond making sure there is a sane development environment with the
right set of tools.

The problem I face is with respect to the KVM. Since I do not have
direct access to a bare-metal server / a server which runs Xen
Hypervisor capable of running a domU with Debian / a Linux VM with
nested virtualization support where I can do the build via
vagrant-libvirt using KVM back-end. The builds fail with a call to
"virDomainCreateWithFlags".

I have access to VirtualBox but looking up online that is not sufficient
enough to do VT-d/VT-x passthrough to my guest Linux. My bare-metal
machine is not equipped to handle builds like Tails.

I also do not mind Vagrant[2] trying use a different back-end like Qemu
without KVM if needed to do the builds, but I am not aware of how to do
this in the current setup.

Looking for suggestions or pointers or documentation for getting this
build working without too much hassle.

Thank you

References

1. https://tails.boum.org/contribute/build/
2. https://tails.boum.org/contribute/build/vagrant-setup/

Regards
Santhosh