Tips & Tricks

Please feel free to add new tips and tricks to this page!

Using sshfs to mount the guest VM's file system in the host.

This command on the host will mount /src in the VM to the /vm-src directory in the host:
```
 sshfs -o idmap=user root@IP:/src /vm-src
```
/vm-src must already exist and have the appropriate permissions
Setting the keyboard layout in your VM

In Linux systems, mapping the keyboard is controlled by the file /etc/inputrc. If you see characters in your VM's console which don't match the keys you pressed on your keyboard, then you will need to create this file in the VM with appropriate content. A quick fix is to try copying the /etc/inputrc from your host to the vm.

See this page for more details about inputrc, including an example file.
Setting up a serial console

Normally in virtualisation hosts the serial console allows copying and pasting text where the default graphical console does not. You can run the following command so that systemd will activate a serial console for you o subsequent boots:
```
 ln -s /lib/systemd/system/getty@.service \
     /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/getty@ttyS0.service
```
You can learn more about systemd and serial consoles here.
Viewing the build log for a chunk

For builds done with morph distbuild, you should find build logs in the directory you ran Morph from with names like build-step-foo.log.

For builds done with morph build, the build logs are available in the artifact cache (/src/cache/artifacts by default). The logs are named xxxx.build-log, where xxxx is the cache key of the chunk artifact. See below for how to find out the cache key of a given build of a chunk.

Finding the cache key for a chunk

The [glossary] briefly explains what a 'cache key' is: it's a 64 character hex string used internally in Morph to identify a specific build of something.

If you're working on Morph's code, or if you're working around a design flaw in its current user interface, you might need to work with cache keys.

The morph list-artifacts command shows the entire build graph for a given system. Run morph help list-artifacts for details. It doesn't matter if you already built the system or not, but if you didn't build it yet then the artifacts listed won't exist in your artifact cache! Here are a couple of examples.

Find the cache key for the version of 'bundler' in the devel system that would be built from the current 'master' of baserock:baserock/definitions

$ morph list-artifacts \
    baserock:baserock/definitions master \
    systems/devel-system-x86_64-generic.morph | grep bundler
fee81bcc7c40d8f37ac13e0a6a6d4b4917bc5a7df276938f67482cfc873d0e94.chunk.bundler-bins
fee81bcc7c40d8f37ac13e0a6a6d4b4917bc5a7df276938f67482cfc873d0e94.chunk.bundler-devel
fee81bcc7c40d8f37ac13e0a6a6d4b4917bc5a7df276938f67482cfc873d0e94.chunk.bundler-doc
fee81bcc7c40d8f37ac13e0a6a6d4b4917bc5a7df276938f67482cfc873d0e94.chunk.bundler-libs
fee81bcc7c40d8f37ac13e0a6a6d4b4917bc5a7df276938f67482cfc873d0e94.chunk.bundler-locale
fee81bcc7c40d8f37ac13e0a6a6d4b4917bc5a7df276938f67482cfc873d0e94.chunk.bundler-misc

Find the cache key for the version of 'vim' in the devel system that would be built from commit '67be3d4a749a18d2e2ff3ce3dce3a1122e8bc89e' of my local checkout of definitions.git

$ morph list-artifacts \
    file://`pwd` master systems/devel-system-x86_64-generic.morph | grep vim
2a969cb4ab2f5eb5e45a60df351e04d6e673d952e70aa7b7ae648da0302b55d9.chunk.vim-bins
2a969cb4ab2f5eb5e45a60df351e04d6e673d952e70aa7b7ae648da0302b55d9.chunk.vim-devel
2a969cb4ab2f5eb5e45a60df351e04d6e673d952e70aa7b7ae648da0302b55d9.chunk.vim-doc
2a969cb4ab2f5eb5e45a60df351e04d6e673d952e70aa7b7ae648da0302b55d9.chunk.vim-libs
2a969cb4ab2f5eb5e45a60df351e04d6e673d952e70aa7b7ae648da0302b55d9.chunk.vim-locale
2a969cb4ab2f5eb5e45a60df351e04d6e673d952e70aa7b7ae648da0302b55d9.chunk.vim-misc

These lists show the name of every chunk artifact that'd be produced, and the first 64 characters of each item is the cache key of the chunk build.