Black Screen when Running .img created with run/sculpt_image

Help / Tech Support
1

Hi! I’ve been following along with the Crafting A Modified Sculpt tutorial, and have run into a problem where run/sculpt_test works fine in the qemu environment with NOVA/pc but sculpt_image with “–include boot_dir/nova --include image/disk” produces an image that, when run in either VirtualBox or booted to directly, show the Genode splash screen and then go totally blank.

I can include one of the images if that would help - I’ve tried leafing though it in 7zip and nothing seemed obviously wrong (though I don’t really know what I’d be looking for).

2

Maybe answers to the following questions help to identify the cause.

  • Which hardware are you booting into?
  • Which source code version is built?
  • Could you build with LOG=core and examine the serial output in Qemu/VirtualBox/hardware?
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3

Back at it again, set it aside for a while after the first time. I’m still doing something wrong.

The following works:

make -C build/x86_64 run/sculpt_test KERNEL=nova BOARD=pc DEPOT=omit LOG=core RUN_OPT="--include boot_dir/nova --include image/disk --depot-auto-update --include power_on/qemu --include log/qemu"

as does downloading the prebuilt image from genode.org.

I am running from git/staging with the latest code.
My hardware is Intel Skylake i5-6600K running Virtual Box 7.0.18 on Windows.

I get the same problem when running on Ubuntu WSL:

make -C build/x86_64 run/sculpt_image KERNEL=nova BOARD=pc DEPOT=omit LOG=core RUN_OPT="--include boot_dir/nova --include image/disk --depot-auto-update --include power_on/qemu --include log/qemu"

qemu-system-x86_64 -D ./log.txt -drive format=raw,file=./depot/genodelabs/image/sculpt-pc-2025-06-06.img

To test on Virtual Box, I tried both converting the .img to a .vdi as well as running sculpt with image/iso and taking it from the var/ folder.

To test on my desktop, I loaded the .img onto a USB using rufus.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to access the serial log, I’ve tried playing with --include log/* , and the qemu -D argument but I think I’m holding it wrong somehow.

4

Several qemu options are missing. Please check Genode - Sculpt OS version 25.04 and use the ones from there. The background is, that the default emulated PC by Qemu is too old.

Also for running Sculpt in Virtualbox several “modern” options in the board and CPU configuration are required. I don’t have that on hand, but you can import once the provided VBox Image (see url) and then you can check the required options for your own experiments.

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5

That worked, thank you so much!

Its running on qemu perfectly now, and boots on my laptop though it seems my touchpad model and network card aren’t supported unfortunately.

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