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

[Stephen Tweedie <sct@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 12:19:53PM -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
 
> Unfortunately, I am completely convinced that the right thing is to have
> the kernel for domU inside the domU's filesystem because anything else
> is just fundamentally not manageable.  

I tend to agree.  The real trouble starts when the storage needed to
boot that domU isn't even visible to the dom0, though --- perhaps
because we've got a virtual HBA (say an iSCSI initiator, or virtual FC
HBA), connected to a SAN which is filtering by initiator so that only
the domU can see the LUN's contents. 

Bootstrapping that sort of environment is nasty.

> So, perhaps we do have to just
> suck it up and go the path of what's essentially mini-OS as a domU
> "bios"

If the domU pre-boot is going to have to have enough smarts to run a
full iSCSI initiator then we might be better off just biting the
bullet and running a proper kernel there with either kexec, or some
manner of domU respawn, to boot the correct kernel/initrd once the
pre-boot one has downloaded them.  Either that, or we basically need
to have special cases for /boot to make sure that those files, plus
the grub.conf-type kernel args, are registered elsewhere (directory?)
for the dom0 to get them from.

--Stephen

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