Re: [PATCH] Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0/3] domUloader

[Kurt Garloff <garloff@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Tim, Jeremy,

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 01:06:18PM +0000, Tim Deegan wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 01:07:00PM -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > Sounds reasonable enough, although I'll have to look at it a little
> > closer when I get back from Austin.  FWIW, partition table handling in
> > pygrub should work fine (I'm installing to full disk vbds with partition
> > tables regularly)
> 
> The partition handling is only enough to find the "active" partition, so
> it doesn't handle extended partitions.  That's not a problem for pygrub,
> but would need to be done to have the extraction tool handle partitions
> properly.

pygrub does assume there's one whole disk export which contains
a DOS style partition table with the /boot partition marked active.
If that one is ext2, everything works fine. (The reiser support
failed in my testing.)

domUloader is more flexible there. It understands both whole disk 
devices and partitions, can handle a set of them, finds the /boot
partition by having it specified in bootentry or by parsing 
/etc/fstab on the partition that's been passed to domU with root=.

Maybe we want to import domUloader in pygrub to just get all this,
as the handling is nicely abstracted there. You just don't call
domUloader.main(argv) then ...

If we do that, the main difference will be that 
- pygrub offers an interactive (ncurses) mode
- pygrub users libraries to get files off the FS, which could be
  somewhat safer and more easily extensible (but currently is not
  (yet?) very reliable and limits the FS choice).

And I'd really like to advocate for the little changes I have done to
XendDomainInfo, XendBootloader and create, so we pass enough information
to the bootloader to handle all this.

> Also, it doesn't work if your e2fsprogs are too old to have
> ext2fs_open2() -- again, not really a bug but the failure mode is a bit
> ugly, 

So I'm not the only that experiences pygrub running OOM?

> and the version in the Xen 3 tarball has this problem.  Is there
> some way of telling from inside a python script whether the pygrub
> library is going to be able to read partitions or not?

Updated domUloader attached.

Best,
-- 
Kurt Garloff, Head Architect, Director SUSE Labs (act.), Novell Inc.

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