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[Xen-devel] Fw: Experience, and questions in using Xen 1.2 with new control tool



This is just a resend of my previous email that I mistakenly have sent to the mail list admin rather than the list.
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 4:34 AM
Subject: Experience, and questions in using Xen 1.2 with new control tool

Hi all,
 
    'Great work!' to The Xen team. In general I think the hypervisor is much more stable and the control tool is much more coherent and centralized in v1.2.
 
    Although I encountered some problems (below) in installing multiple domains' filesystems in my harddrive and it has been a long day to fix them, after everything is ready one can be familiar with the new tool very quickly. With just some alias and shell script I can use multiple configs for different domains and use the general control tool to play with them comfortably.
 
    Some questions and remarks:
 
    1) After starting new domain I can only ssh to it by 'ssh root@xxxxxxxxxxx' but not as what in the README.CD of Xen 1.2 (and earlier) says to ssh with port number 2200 + domain_id, if so I would get connection refused. I have started 'xen_nat_enable' am I setting anything wrong or missing anything? Or just leave it?
 
    2) 'xc destroy' is so powerful that it can kill Domain 0 directly without even a checking or a prompt, if the admin (likely be root) accidentally key in 0 and enter without serious checking this may cause troubles.
 
    3) I am using 256MB in my laptop running 128MB for domain 0, but I can't use up the rest of the memory for other domains. Is there any upper bound? By the way I have tried running a domain by just using 8MB memory and ssh it successfully. (2MB is not enough for kernel and 4MB with applications complaining not enough pages) And one more is that if there is not enough memory the return message will be 'error creating domain', it would be useful if it can point to something related to memory.
 
    4) I am not sure if the suspend/restore function is ready. But I have tried Create->Stop->Save a domain and Restore->Start it again. The network interface and sshd seem totally down after restore, if the sshd is down seems there is no way to rescue it (will this push the read/write console for domains upper on the to-do list?:-)
 
        The 'cpu_time' displayed by 'xc list' of the saved and then restored domain seems not accurate, I am not entirely sure about this I will try to reproduce and report later. Be aware that the restore function starts the domain in the newest domain_id rather than it's orginal id, so the IP address of it would look different to the new domain_id after restored. I have experieced once (I remember when using just 8/16MB memory) that after a domain is restored it keeps generate error message like the followings, is this normal?
 
===========================================================
DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: IO failure
DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode
 block - inode=2862, block=93
DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: IO failure
DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)) in ext3_orphan_add: IO failure
DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode
 block - inode=2862, block=93
DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: IO failure
DOM17: EXT3-fs error (device hd(3,11)): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode
 block - inode=2862, block=93
===========================================================
 
    5) Just a minor one, in the README.CD for Xen1.2 (and before), in the section "Installing the file systems from the CD", when copying the files to /usr the directory 'root' is included, which seems not appropriate. And there were some directories inside 'local' which don't seem appropriate (some personal files I think) as well, which you may not want to include in the next ISO. Can't wait to see the official Xen 1.2 really.
 
    Hope this helps. More to come.
 
Cheers,
Yan-Ching CHU
 
 
 

 


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