Tailscale on the DevTerm R-01

Jan 25, 2023 [ #devterm #riscv #linux #tailscale ]

Contents

• Intro
• Building a TUN/TAP Kernel Module
  • Installing Required Packages
  • Cloning ClockworkPi Kernel Source
  • Setting Up Build Toolchain
  • Existing Kernel Config from DevTerm
  • Enabling CONFIG_TUN
  • Building the Kernel
• Setting up New Modules on DevTerm
  • Loading the TUN/TAP Module
  • Setting up Tailscale

Intro

Recently I assembled a ClockworkPi DevTerm R-01, a cyberdeck-like terminal with a RISC-V compute module. While the retro-future design of the DevTerm really appealed to me, and I’ve also been wanting to work with RISC-V for a while to learn a new architecture making the R-01 a perfect esoteric project platform.

After trying out a few things like DOSBox, Surf, and ScummVM, I found the Allwinner D1 RISC-V chip wasn’t powerful enough to do much other than some basic window management, Interactive Fiction, and browsing gopher:// with Bombadillo. However I still wanted to use it as a terminal to access other systems, which lead me to attempting to install Tailscale to leverage the mesh VPN and other features.

Installing tailscale was un-eventful, as it’s had RISC-V support for a while, and following the install guide did what was expected. The problem is tailscaled fails due to the required tun kernel module missing in the 5.4.61 kernel running on the DevTerm.

Jan 26 02:25:17 localhost systemd[1]: Started Tailscale node agent.
Jan 26 02:25:17 localhost tailscaled[1074605]: wgengine.NewUserspaceEngine(tun "tailscale0") ...
Jan 26 02:25:17 localhost tailscaled[1074605]: Linux kernel version: 5.4.61
Jan 26 02:25:17 localhost tailscaled[1074605]: is CONFIG_TUN enabled in your kernel? `modprobe tun` failed with: modprobe: FATAL: Module tun not found in directory /lib/modules/5.4.61
Jan 26 02:25:19 localhost tailscaled[1074605]: tun module not loaded nor found on disk
Jan 26 02:25:19 localhost tailscaled[1074605]: wgengine.NewUserspaceEngine(tun "tailscale0") error: tstun.New("tailscale0"): CreateTUN("tailscale0") failed; /dev/net/tun does not exist
Jan 26 02:25:19 localhost tailscaled[1074605]: flushing log.
Jan 26 02:25:19 localhost tailscaled[1074605]: logger closing down

Building a TUN/TAP Kernel Module

The first step was finding if the R-01 kernel source was available so re-build the exact kernel version and include the tun module by setting CONFIG_TUN=m. Looking around the ClockworkPi website, Discord, and Github I eventually found the How to Compile Kernel documentation. This had links to the original source and the toolchain.

Since the R-01 isn’t exactly fast, cross-building this on a x86 system was required. My personal Debian server is a bit of mess when it comes to package pinning, so I created a new 8 CPU, 8GiB memory virtual machine in qemu and install Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish” since that’s what the R-01 is running and what ClockworkPi has in it’s documentation.

Installing Required Packages

After setting up the VM, install required packages for cross-building the kernel,

sudo apt-get install gcc-11-riscv64-linux-gnu binutils-riscv64-linux-gnu qemu-user-static build-essential git wget curl vim libncurses-dev flex automake autoconf bison libssl-dev

Cloning ClockworkPi Kernel Source

Clone the kernel source into ~/git,

mkdir ~/git
git clone https://github.com/cuu/last_linux-5.4.git

Setting Up Build Toolchain

Download the ClockworkPi toolchain from https://github.com/cuu/toolchain-thead-glibc, which is a README pointing to a Mega link. While it’s a bit concerning coming from Mega, since it’s a tarball and running in a VM it’s not that risky. There’s also a section on installing the official RISC-V toolchain which is another option, but requires additional building.

Untar in home directory,

cd ~
tar -xvzf riscv64-glibc-gcc-thead_20200702.tar.gz

Existing Kernel Config from DevTerm

Copy the running kernel config in /proc/config.gz on the DevTerm to the VM. The config.gz contains the configuration for how the running 5.4.61 kernel was configured and is loaded to set everything the exact same way when building the new kernel.

cd ~/git/last_linux-5.4
scp cpi@devterm:/proc/config.gz .
gunzip config.gz
mv config .config

Enabling CONFIG_TUN

There are two ways to enable the TUN/TAP module,

• Edit .config and set CONFIG_TUN=m

or

• Interactively run menuconfig and set it in Device Drivers -> Network device support -> Universal TUN/TAP device driver support

export PATH=~/riscv64-glibc-gcc-thead_20200702/bin/:$PATH
make LOCALVERSION= CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu- ARCH=riscv menuconfig

Building the Kernel

Build the kernel using the provided m.sh script, but first edit it to include the PATH for the toolchain and LOCALVERSION=. If LOCALVERSION= isn’t set then the kernel version will include a + at the end and modules will not load due to a version mis-match,

export PATH=~/riscv64-glibc-gcc-thead_20200702/bin/:$PATH
make LOCALVERSION= CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu- ARCH=riscv
make LOCALVERSION= CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu- ARCH=riscv INSTALL_MOD_PATH=test/rootfs/ modules_install
make LOCALVERSION= CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu- ARCH=riscv INSTALL_PATH=test/boot/ zinstall
mkdir -p test/boot/
cp arch/riscv/boot/dts/sunxi/board.dtb test/boot/

Run ./m.sh and wait a few minutes while it builds.

When successful, the new kernel and modules are in test/boot/

Setting up New Modules on DevTerm

Create a tarball of the new modules and copy them to the DevTerm,

cd ~/git/last_linux-5.4/test/rootfs/lib/modules
tar -cvzf 5.4.61.modules.tar.gz 5.4.61/
scp 5.4.61.modules.tar.gz cpi@devterm:~

On the DevTerm, backup original modules directory,

cd /lib/modules
sudo mv 5.4.61 5.4.61.orig

and untar the new modules directory,

cd /lib/modules
sudo tar -xvzf ~/5.4.61.modules.tar.gz

Loading the TUN/TAP Module

Load the new TUN/TAP Module,

sudo modprobe tun

If successfull dmesg will show,

tun: Universal TUN/TAP device driver, 1.6

Setting up Tailscale

Now that the TUN/TAP module is loaded, start tailscaled and finish setting up Tailscale,

sudo service tailscaled start
sudo tailscale up