Installation

This guide assumes that you already have a Xen or KVM-VMI setup. If not, please refer to the following resources to set up your environment:

Heimdall requires the libvmi library for Virtual Machine Introspection capabilities. Follow the instructions in the libvmi repository to build and install it:

1. Install libvmi

sudo apt install git build-essential gcc libtool cmake pkg-config check libglib2.0-dev libvirt-dev flex bison libjson-c-dev
git clone https://github.com/libvmi/libvmi
cd libvmi
autoreconf -vif

Xen

./configure --disable-kvm --disable-bareflank --disable-file
make
sudo make install

KVM

./configure --disable-xen --disable-bareflank --disable-file
make
sudo make install

2. Install libvmi-python

git clone https://github.com/libvmi/python libvmi-python
cd libvmi-python
python3 setup.py build
python3 setup.py install

3. Install Heimdall

Finally, install Heimdall itself:

python3 -m pip install heimdall-vmi

Note: If you prefer not to use sudo when running Heimdall, I recommend installing it with pipx. After installing with pipx, add setuid permissions to the virtual environment, allowing Heimdall to run with elevated privileges without requiring sudo each time.

To install Heimdall using pipx:

pipx install heimdall-vmi

Then, set setuid permissions on the virtual environment’s binaries:

sudo chmod u+s $(which heimdall-vmi)

This will allow Heimdall to execute with necessary permissions directly from the pipx virtual environment.